


Darling, Dead and Wounded

by venus_ink



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Supernatural
Genre: F/F, Female Harry Potter, Female Sam Winchester, Hunters & Hunting, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Lesbian Character, Magic, Multi, Murder, Ravenclaw Harry Potter, very weird attempt at mixing the two worlds
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:08:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 27,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24701332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venus_ink/pseuds/venus_ink
Summary: The first time Sam killed a man, she was eleven.Well, no, that wasn’t quite right. The first time Sam Winchester killed a man, she was eleven. But Sam’s first kill was earlier than she could remember, back when she was a few months past a year old, when she went by another name.Back when she was Harriet Potter.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Harry Potter
Comments: 22
Kudos: 213





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back with a new fic! I'm rewatching Supernatural right now, and this just kinda sprung into existence a few days ago. It'll eventually cover Sam/Harriet's Hogwarts years, but the first few chapters take place before she goes to school. I'm somewhat winging it when it comes to making the two worlds and magic systems overlap, so please give feedback when it comes up!
> 
> Title is vaguely inspired by the song Jack-A-Roe by the Grateful Dead, I thought it fit Sam's character.

The first time Sam killed a man, she was eleven. 

Well, no, that wasn’t quite right. The first time  _ Sam Winchester _ killed a man, she was eleven. But Sam’s first kill was earlier than she could remember, back when she was a few months past a year old, when she went by another name.

Back when she was Harriet Potter.

Hell, she wondered if she’d set a record for youngest hunter to have their first kill. She probably had. There wasn’t a lot of pride for something like that though, not for her at least. Dad would probably frown but clap her on the shoulder as he tended to do when he wanted to show fatherly emotion, tell her she’d be a good hunter someday, and give her the talk about how to handle killing that he’d given Dean a year or two ago. But he didn’t even know about her kill at eleven, some creep behind a bar who ran directly through the knife she had pulled, a man who she quickly realized was an unturned werewolf when she saw the fur growing over his dead body and the sizzling wound where the silver had touched him, and she and Dad didn’t really…  _ talk _ about that night when she was a baby.

She didn’t even really remember anything from back then, just the story Dad had told her that he heard from Eugene, how he had found her safe and sound in her crib with three dead bodies in the house and ash covering everything else in her room but her and the area right around her.

That was the bit she’d been told her whole life, how she was the sole survivor of an attack, suspiciously untouched by the events of that night, no marks but the bloody lightning bolt scar on her brow. It was when she was six or so that she heard the rest of the story, how her parents were witches- or her mother was a witch, her father a wizard, she supposed- and they had been attacked by another wizard, some magical terrorist that hunters were only vaguely aware of. He generally only killed other witches, though, so they couldn’t really bring themselves to care; what witches did to each other wasn’t hunter business. But her parents were murdered by the man, shot down with some spell that no one was supposed to survive, and then she survived it.

Eugene had been investigating a few suspicious murders in the area at the time, ones where all the witnesses either gave matching descriptions of men in robes and masks shooting lights out of sticks, or had no memory of the night at all- not just poor recollection, an entire blank for the hours of the events. Dad had given her the case files once, for her eighth birthday when he was sick of her questions, and she saw a symbol drawn there, sketched in the same style as everything Eugene drew, a skull with a snake wound through the mouth. Apparently it had been projected in the air at the scene of each crime, a calling card. She had doodled the symbol on just about everything, at first so that she wouldn’t forget it, and then after that just out of habit, until a teacher some time in sixth grade had sent her to the counselor for gang symbols and violent tendencies or something like that.

Honestly, she had only gotten in, like, two fights there, and she hadn’t started either of them. It was around that school that she had realized fighting back against bullies only got  _ you _ in trouble when you were a trained fighter. She started keeping her head down.

But that wasn’t the point, the point was the kill. Besides surviving some supposedly universally fatal blow, she had also sent the spell right back at the terrorist wizard guy who had attacked her. He died upon impact, his body on the floor in front of her crib and a thin coating of ash on the floor as though he had been burned. He was burned, of course, immediately after that- salted and toasted to a crisp by Eugene before he grabbed her from the crib and set off.

The way Dad told the story, Eugene had kept her with him in an inn a hundred miles away from the scene of the crime for a few days before he called his old buddy John Winchester saying, “Oi, you got a kid, right? How’d you feel ‘bout another one?”

Originally, Dad said no. He’d never lied to her about that, even though she hadn’t spoken to him for two weeks after he told her the first time. He’d said no, hands down, fuck off. But Eugene kept pushing, and when his next case brought him to Texas, where Dad and Dean had been, he’d showed up right outside their door, one arm in a sling and the other carrying her, blood covering his face and his shirt, and begged once again for John to take the baby. 

Dean was the one who told her that part of the story. Said it was the most vivid memory he had. Eugene had handed her to him while Dad dressed his wounds, and he said he knew in that moment that he wasn’t gonna let her go. And he meant it. He’d argued with Dad for hours, pitching the most weirdly mature hissyfit that Eugene said he’d ever seen, and finally John Winchester gave in.

“Fine,” he’d said. “You want the kid, you can have her. But that’s a commitment from you, Dean. We keep the kid, she’s under your protection, and you don’t get to let me down. Not with this one.”

They’d named her Sam. It wasn’t short for anything, no matter what all her teachers seemed to think. It wasn’t Samantha, wasn’t Samia, wasn’t Samara. Sam. Just Sam. Dean’s mom had been pregnant when she’d died- demonic house fire, she’d learned a bit later- and they were gonna name the little boy Samuel after Mary’s dad. He would have been right about her age if he hadn’t died right there with his mother. 

Sam Winchester was the only name she’d ever known, and it was the only name she had any interest in going by. Sam Winchester was the name of the girl with buzzed hair and Dean’s old flannels and ripped up sneakers, and Sam Winchester was the name of the girl with mud under her fingernails and grass stains on her knees who could shoot a better shot than anybody else in whatever town they were staying in, hold Dean and Dad, the girl who spoke Latin just about fluently and read it just as well as English, the girl who fought monsters, or would one day at least.

She was the girl who fell asleep against her brother’s shoulder in the backseat of Dad’s Impala, threw little Christmases in filthy motel rooms, though they had stopped that one after Dad stopped showing up. She and Dean did Easter, though, baskets and candy and everything.

Harriet Potter, though. She didn’t  _ mean _ anything. She was just a name. Sam wasn’t even really convinced it was her name anymore, even technically.

They were in one of those filthy motel rooms now, just her and Dean. He was asleep by now, or doing a damn good job of faking it, and she was in the chair in the corner trying to read a book by candlelight, something which she had quickly discovered was much easier in movies, but Dean had nicked her a Jane Austen back in Seattle, so she wasn’t gonna complain.

Every once in a while someone walked by the room, as was the way of seedy motels in the middle of nowhere; you didn’t really  _ go _ to a place like that, you just ended up there, so people showing up or leaving in the middle of the night was normal. 

Another set of footsteps approached, but they were louder this time, boots instead of sneakers if she had to guess, stopping right outside the door. She glanced around, checking through the window to see if someone was looking in- wouldn’t be the first time they’d gotten creeped on- but no one was there. Her hand itched for the knife in her pocket so she pulled it out, flipping out the short blade and spinning it around in her fingers as she liked to do when she was nervous. It was a reminder, Dean had told her once, when he admitted that he did the same thing with his gun, a reminder that you’re in control of the situation.

The door flew open a few moments later, and just as soon as she was out of her seat, brandishing a knife in each hand, Dean had flipped the lightswitch by the bed and bolted upright, pointing a gun at the intruder.

“Kids,” Dad barked, not even phased by the weapons in his face. “Get your asses packed. We’re leaving in ten minutes.”

“Yessir,” Dean said immediately, dropping the gun on the bed.

“Where are we going this time?” Sam had to ask.

He watched her for a moment, his eyes hard to the point of just looking tired, and Sam felt the rare pang of guilt for how often she fought with Dad, so much that an innocent question already had him wary of the explosion that would follow. “Bobby’s,” he said finally.

Her face broke into a grin, and she glanced over at Dean to see his quiet smile mirroring her as he folded his clothes neatly, military-style, as he stacked them in the duffle.

“I’ll be in the car,” he added.

“Here,” Dean called once the door had slammed shut. “This don’t fit me anymore- see if it’ll work for pajamas or somethin’.” He threw a t-shirt at her, one he had picked up only a few stops ago out in Forks after his own had gotten a bit too covered in guts from the werewolves he and Dad had been hunting back in Washington. Dad had grabbed the first one on the rack, some size medium thing with a joke about vampires on the front. It wasn’t really as funny for hunters.

“Thanks,” she told him, shoving it in her bag with the rest of her stuff, a good bit more clothes than Dean had, but fewer guns and no magazines stuffed in the bottom, so it all evened out in the end. She had all her usual stuff, cargo pants and thick jeans and flannels and t-shirts with classic rock bands on them, mostly stuff Dean had outgrown, and then she had the couple of things she’d gotten as presents of sorts whenever she started school somewhere they were going to stay for a while, clothes that Dean had said might help her fit in a bit better. 

On top of that, she had what she called her bait clothes.

Bait clothes had been purchased when she was twelve or so, short skirts and cropped shirts and a black dress that was shorter than most of her shirts, clothes that could get her into a bar without a second glance at her fake ID. She didn’t like them much, but every once in a while she needed it, when Dad needed her to distract someone or get into some place he couldn’t, or when she didn’t need to look older or interesting, just young and harmless and somebody people wanted to help. 

Dean hated it, and it was the only thing he had really fought with Dad about as long as she could remember. He’d kept saying how she was too young, and it was putting her in too much danger, and he could do it instead, right? But Dad said no, said he had given in when Dean begged him not to make her hunt yet, when Dean had begged him to try and only move a few times each school year, when Dean had begged him to keep her at all- neither of them knew she had heard that part of the argument; Dad made pretty careful to hiss it in Dean’s ear instead of shouting like he had done with the rest of it- and she would be safe, he said. Because Dean would be watching out for her, wouldn’t he?

She hated him for that. Using that against him.

She knew he hadn’t really meant it about only keeping her ‘cause Dean wanted to. Sure, it had been that at first, she had accepted that years ago, but they were a family now, and she doubted they were more dysfunctional than any other family of hunters.

She threw her toiletries in her bag a good bit harder than she needed to, and she saw Dean glance over with a bit of concern before zipping up his bag and slinging it over his shoulder. She went to do the same but he had already grabbed it off the bed to throw over his other shoulder, flashing her his trademarked grin and let her run to catch up after she made the beds, an old habit she didn’t care to shake, even though Dad and Dean both teased her for it. 

She liked the places looking the same way when they left it as they had when they showed up, every trace of them erased so there was nothing left to hold onto. They didn’t need to understand.

Dean tossed their bags in the trunk and was opened the passenger seat door before catching her eye and seeing the pout she was sporting. “You need a human pillow, Sammy?” he teased, slamming the door shut again and swinging into the back beside her.

“Mhmm. Com’ere, pillow,” she demanded with a grin. 

“Bitch,” was all he said, shooting her a glare, but there was no heat behind it- three a.m. didn’t leave either of them with a lot of energy.

“Jerk,” she replied automatically. She pulled off her denim jacket to use as a blanket and balled up her flannel in Dean’s lap to use as a pillow, curling up on the back seat until she was as small as possible, a learned habit, not a natural one. She felt Dean’s hand absently rubbing circles on her back, and she sighed contentedly. They had an unspoken truce in the Impala, it had been going on for years to the point that other people even started to notice it. They could fight as much as they wanted in the house or motel that they were staying in, but once they were in the car it was best behavior. Bickering was fine- hell, she doubted they’d be able to stop if they tried- but no fighting, and definitely nothing that would make Dad mad.

“Your hair’s getting long, Sammy,” he remarked, quiet enough that Dad probably couldn’t hear. “Almost long enough for a ponytail if we don’t cut it soon.”

“It is long enough for a ponytail,” she corrected. “Doesn’t get in my face that way.”

“If you’re not careful, people are gonna start thinkin’ you’re a girl,” he teased.

“I  _ am _ a girl,” she grumbled. He really wasn’t gonna let up on that one, was he. God, get mistaken for a boy at a gas station  _ one time _ , and suddenly Dean was America’s next top comedian.

She could feel his chest rumbling with laughter and his voice softened. “Yeah, I know.”

She heard his breathing change a few minutes later so she knew he had fallen asleep. He had always been better at the whole falling asleep sitting up thing than she had, hence his head firmly lodged between the edge of the seat and the side of the car as he snored quietly, while she curled up horizontal in his lap. She’d caught Dad taking a picture of them like that once a few years ago, and she was pretty sure it was still in his wallet. She hadn’t seen him smile all soft like that in a while.

“Sir?” she asked softly, trying not to wake up her sleeping brother.

“Everything good, Sam?”

“Yessir. I was just wondering if you’re staying at Bobby’s with us, sir.”

“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll be there for a night or so- Eugene’s gonna pick me up. We’re working a case out near Minneapolis that might take a month or so, and then we’re probably gonna stick around there and the Great Lakes for a month after that. You know how everybody out there gets around May Day.”

“Yessir. Will I be able to enroll in school, sir? If we’re with Bobby for two months.”

“I won’t have time to help set you up, but if you and Dean want to get you in then go ahead,” he agreed. 

“Thank you, sir.”

“Go to bed, Sam.”

“Yessir.”


	2. Chapter 2

They were still driving when she woke up the next morning, flat plains whipping past them at breakneck speeds, and she had to wonder how Dad ever made it through a whole drive like that without passing out. Dean was up already, sipping a cup of coffee that they must have stopped for at some point, even if Sam couldn’t remember it.

She sat up to stretch, groaning as she felt her muscles aching from the weird position she had chosen to sleep in. Dad was playing Zeppelin at a low enough volume that it just sounded wrong, but she wasn’t gonna complain; any louder would just make her headache worse.

“Sleeping Beauty awakes,” Dean announced, his voice still scratchy.

“Ha, ha,” she drawled, grabbing the coffee from him and taking a long sip. “Where are we?”

“About to hit Nebraska City,” Dad told her, cutting off Dean’s cry at her beverage theft. “Dean, you good to drive the last couple hours? I need to catch a few before we get to Bobby’s.”

“Of course, sir,” was the immediate response, but Sam could hear the excitement and even the little bit of smugness in his agreement. Sam couldn’t imagine caring about a car the way Dean loved the Impala, but it was nice to see him happy about something. And it wasn’t like it would be reasonable not to trust him with the car; he’d been driving since- what?- twelve? Maybe eleven, she couldn’t remember exactly. She’d started driving, too, but not enough that Dad would let her drive without supervision.

He pulled off a few minutes later into a gas station, and she followed Dean out of the back seat so Dad could climb in, where he immediately passed out. Fun.

“Get me some chips,” Dean told her, tossing a few bills at her. “And whatever else you think we should have.”

Three waters, a bag of chips, two coffees, a pack of gum, a bottle of sunscreen, and a roll of toilet paper later, she popped back out of the store to see the car pulled up right outside the door of the convenience store. 

Dean had put on Dad’s leather jacket- it was still cold in Iowa in March- and he had put on sunglasses too, he’d rolled the window down, and he had one hand on the wheel and the other resting lazily over the seat. 

“Need a ride?” he called, leaning his head out the window and tossing his hair. It had grown out like hers had, she noticed. She’d need to cut it before it started bothering him.

“You are so weird,” she mumbled, chucking the bag of chips at his head.

“Aw, come on, Sammy,” he complained, mussing her hair as she swung into the other seat. “I look cool and you know it.”

“Whatever you say, jerk.”

“Glad you agree, bitch.”

Dad was a lot better at sleeping through loud music than either of them were, a talent she supposed came with years and years of hunting. One wrong footstep had him awake and ready to fight, but the man could sleep right through a storm. It didn’t make any sense, but she sure was grateful when he didn’t even stir at the wind roaring in the opened windows and Boston pounding through the speakers.

Between Dad’s snores, Sam couldn’t help but feel some sense of peace around the whole thing. She could almost pretend it was just her and Dean flying through the countryside, headed out to see an old friend. He teased her about how high pitched her voice was as she sang along, her arm out the window tapping on the side of the car as she ignored the goosebumps forming under her skin, and she stole his chips while he wasn’t looking, even though she knew he knew she was doing it. It was about the game, not the actual stealing. She wondered what it would be like if they could just drive forever, just them on the open road with shitty take-out and good music.

Heaven, she decided. That would be heaven.

She’d miss school though, if she was being honest, or at least she’d miss studying. Hell, she had even started to look forward to Dad’s assignments or research for cases that she used to whine about endlessly. That’s how bored she was when they hadn’t been in a town long enough to enroll her in a school in a couple of months. So bored she actually looked forward to hunting research. And Sam  _ hated _ hunting research.

Well, no, that wasn’t really it. She liked the actual research; the lore was fascinating, anything in Latin was bound to be enjoyable, pattern recognition had her feeling like Sherlock Holmes. She just hated the urgency surrounding it all, how no information was good enough unless she had every answer Dad could imagine needing, and how the endgame of whatever work she had to do was killing, either Dad and Dean killing the monster or something finally killing them. Kinda put a damper on things.

“Did you sleep at all last night?” Dean asked an hour or so later, turning down the music a bit so he wouldn’t have to shout.

She tilted her head to the side. “You woke me up just a bit ago,” she reminded him.

“Nah, I mean before we left. When Dad got back, you were in the chair.”

“Oh, right. Nah, I was reading before that, started that book you nicked me a couple weeks ago.”

He sighed. “You gotta sleep, Sammy. Try to catch a few for the rest of the drive- Dad wants us training and researching as soon as we get to Bobby’s.”

“I’m fine,” she told him, shaking her head.

“You’re not fine, dumbass, drifting in and out in the back of a moving vehicle isn’t gonna cut it. Don’t argue with me, I need you fine enough to trust you with a gun.”

“Whatever,” she grumbled, but she did what he asked, turning to lay across the front seat with her head against his leg.

“Was it nightmares again?” Dean asked after a minute.

“No,” she denied, feeling her cheeks heat up at the concern in his tone. “No, I haven’t had any in weeks. Not since we left Seattle.”

“Then what was keeping you up?”

She hesitated. “You brought a girl back the night before, jerk,” she said finally, kicking the glove compartment closed with her toe.

“And?”

“ _ And _ you should stop that.”

He scoffed. “Can’t stop perfection, Sammy.”

She rolled her eyes and reached up to shove his shoulder. “I don’t mean stop getting girls, De, I don’t care what you do with ‘em, I mean stop bringing ‘em back to our place. It’s weird, and I don’t want to sleep in a bed you fucked a girl in the night before.”

“I washed the sheets,” he argued weakly.

“It’s whatever,” she dismissed. “Just, y’know, try going to their houses next time? I mean you wouldn’t want to sleep in a bed I got with a girl in, you gotta see how weird that would be.”

He frowned. “Yeah, you’re, uh, you’re right. That would be weird. Sorry ‘bout that, I’ll stop.” He paused, chewing on his lip. “Girl?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I’m thinkin’ so.”

He nodded sagely. “Good taste, Sammy. Women… women are great.”

“I  _ am _ a woman, you know that right?”

“Sure I do.” He broke off and groaned. “You know this means I’m gonna have to give you the talk, right?”

“You’ve already given me the talk, De,” she reminded him, a fierce blush creeping onto her cheeks. She’d been ten, and it had been the most awkward conversation they’d had, maybe ever. They hadn’t made eye contact for a good month afterwards.

“Yeah, but that was like the… the hypothetical making a baby talk,” he told her. “This is gonna have to be the safe sex talk and the consent talk and shit. Quite possibly even worse.”

“How do  _ you _ know about safe lesbian sex?” she asked, half accusatory and half out of reluctant curiosity.

He shrugged. “I’m eighteen, it’s just one of those things you know eventually. Say, you had a girlfriend yet, or are you just guessin’?”

“Almost did,” she replied, grateful for the subject change. “It’s why I was so pissy after we left. Almost felt bad about it, but it’s not like I could tell Dad. He’d just get on my ass for forming attachments again.”

“That girl you were hanging out with?” Dean remembered. “What was her name again?”

“Maya.” Sam readjusted so she was lying on her back, looking up at her brother. “I really liked her, y’know? I mean, I know it’s not like it could ever go anywhere, but it felt like it could.”

“I’m sorry,” Dean told her, and he looked just as surprised as she was by the sheer level of sincerity in his voice. “You already know it’s dumb to get attached to people, so I don’t need to lecture you about it,” he explained with a shrug. “So I can move on from that and tell you that you deserve to be able to have girlfriends or whatever. Shouldn’t be all about moving around and staying distant.”

She nodded, hoping he understood what his words meant to her. “I kissed her, y’know. Three days before we left town,” she added, cutting off Dean’s exclamation of ‘hell yeah, Sammy’. “She was home sick the day we left, so she doesn’t-” she cut off to keep her voice from cracking, taking a deep breath before trying again. “She didn’t know we were leaving, she doesn’t know where we’re going or why. She’d’ve just showed up back at school a few days later and had some teacher tell her how her almost girlfriend moved away without saying anything.”

They fell silent after that, and she fell asleep with Dean humming Smoke on the Water and rubbing absent circles on her arm. She was all good for an hour and a half or so, but good things never last was practically the hunter motto, and she woke up by bolting upright and slamming her head directly into the steering wheel.

Dean didn’t even bother to smother his laugh, but it fell within a moment of seeing the look on her face. “What’s goin’ on, Sammy?”

She glanced back to make sure Dad was asleep. “Another vision,” she told him under her breath. “Whatever’s causing ‘em… it’s angry, De. It’s really angry.”

“What did you see?” he asked, and she could see him slipping from older brother into hunter, ready to catalogue her every word. 

“It wasn’t a death this time, so that’s good at least, and it wasn’t a prediction,” she admitted. “But when it’s death, the thing is happy. This was more like… failure? Maybe? Or disappointment? Something that made it angry. And something about a rock, or stone, I guess. I think it wanted a stone but somethin’ stopped it?”

“Is anybody in danger? Are we?”

She shook her head. “No, it doesn’t want to hurt anybody this time. I don’t know what it means honestly.”

“That’s good at least,” he reasoned. “I mean, if it’s not hurting anyone, it probably doesn’t matter what it’s doing, for now at least.”

That was true. “Where are we?”

“Bobby’s is about half an hour away. Wake Dad, will you?”

Bobby was like the anti John Winchester. When they stayed with Bobby, it was all about relaxing and being taken care of and getting the good kind of independence, and Sam loved him. He had never given her a second glance about not being Dad’s real kid, just looked long and hard at her the first time she walked into his house at age ten with her bright red curls and freckled skin and Led Zeppelin shirt and given her a firm nod and asked if she wanted a slice of pie.

Dean pulled into the lot fifteen minutes later.

Bobby had them pulled into a tight hug before they even had time to set down their things. “How’ve ya been, kids?” he asked, leading them into the kitchen and pulling out yet another pie, cherry this time, while Dad went upstairs to shower.

“We’ve been good,” Dean answered for them both. “I got to drive here,” he added, his eyes sparkling.

The older man raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think your daddy’s ever let me drive that car, you know that? He once drove it with a broken leg rather than let me behind the wheel.”

That sounded just like Dad, and Sam couldn’t help but laugh. The satisfied sort of pride in Dean’s eyes softened her smile. “You get to keep it for a couple months,” she remembered. “Dad’s leaving it here and riding with Eugene."

“He say how long he’d be leaving you two here?” Bobby interrupted.

She winced. “‘Bout two months, if that’s alright.”

Bobby let out a long sigh. “‘Course it’s alright, you idjit. I love having you kids here, I just wish your daddy would stick around for you two.”

Sam just shrugged. “He’s got hunting to do.”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean, kid.”

“And I’m gonna go to school, too. We gotta get me set up on Monday,” she added, looking up at Dean. “That good?”

“Sure, we can do that. You’re gonna be in… eighth? Ninth grade?”

“I should be in eighth, but all my classes were high school ones back in Seattle, so I wanna see if they’ll let me test up, y’know?”

“Someone’s gotta be the smart one,” he agreed with a shrug, reaching over to mess up her hair.

“You gonna go too, son?” Bobby asked. “You’d be a senior this year, right?”

“Yessir, but I haven’t gone at all this year, so I have no credits to transfer. I don’t even know where all my transcripts are.”

“I have ‘em,” Sam informed him. “I had them print yours out, too, when they gave me mine. They’re all in my bag, chronological and everything.”

“How many schools’ve I been to anyway?” Dean asked. “I stopped counting somewhere in middle school.”

“Uh, twenty-five, I think?” she guessed. “Somewhere right around there. I’ve been to around the same, but I got a bunch in this year.” Bobby was getting that look on his face like he’d sucked on a lemon, only that lemon was usually John Winchester’s parenting skills, so she decided to change the subject. “What’ve you been up to, Bobby?”

“The usual,” he told them. “Though I’ve got a lot of work, so I’m gonna need your help in the shop again, Dean, especially if you’re not going to school.”

“Of course,” he agreed. He paused. “Dad’s done showering. You wanna go train for a bit, Sammy? Let Dad and Bobby catch up, huh?”

She nodded, seeing the dismissal for what it was, and set her and Dean’s plates in the sink before running to catch up with her brother who had already made it outside with two six packs of empty beer bottles.

“Alright, I’m starting you on the Taurus,” he decided, pulling a gun from the left side of his belt and tossing it to her while he lined up bottles on the top of the fence. “This one’s got more kickback than the ones you’re used to, okay? So I’m gonna guide you for the first couple shots.” He crossed back to where she waited, standing behind her as she raised the gun to point at the first bottle. “Good form, Sammy,” he praised. “Safety off.” He rested one hand on her waist and used the other to stabilize her arm as she prepared to shoot. “Whenever you’re ready.”

She made sure her shot was level and pulled the trigger, hearing the shattering of glass as she just about fell on her ass if not for Dean holding her up. “How do you shoot this thing?” she mumbled.

“Practice, Sammy,” he replied with a shit eating grin. “And I didn’t have nobody holding my hand while I learned, so you better count yourself lucky.”

She did count herself lucky, hell she couldn’t go an hour without thinking about it, about how Dean learned everything years younger than she did, with no help or encouragement, just Dad barking orders like he always did, while she got to learn them in her own time with Dean helping her every step of the way.

She didn't know how he did it, the straight up learning and dealing with dad both. He did everything, really, training, hunting with Dad, taking care of her- hell, raising her when she was younger- working, researching, training her; honestly, it wasn’t much of a shock that he had given up on school. She was just hoping she could convince him to get his GED, just in case.

Steadying herself, she raised the gun again, aiming for the next bottle. She braced herself a little harder, a lot harder, really, and that shot didn’t send her sprawling the same way the first one had. She shot the next two in quick succession after that.

“Yeah, this one’s easier if you shoot ‘em all in a row,” Dean agreed, reading her surprise when she stayed perfectly upright through the last ones. “See if you can get it from further away, come ‘ere.”

She practiced with the gun for while longer before they ditched their weapons and sparred for an hour or so, and they came back into the house, Dean with a black eye, Sam with a split lip, and both of them smiling so wide it hurt.

“Hell happened to you two?” Bobby asked, looking almost a bit disturbed as he let them wash their hands in the sink before giving them more pie.

“Training,” Dean told him matter-of-factly. “This one’s getting too good at the wrestling thing though, I might have to stop teaching her so she doesn’t start beating me someday.”

“I beat you today,” she argued indignantly, poking his arm with her fork.

“Barely.”

“Jerk.”

“Bitch.”

“Kids,” Dad interrupted. “I need you two researching for me. Everything you can find on sirens, alright?”

They nodded. It was going to be a long night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you thought!


	3. Chapter 3

“Y’know, you kids are getting pretty old to keep sharing,” Bobby told them, holding the bedroom door open so they could bring their stuff in. 

“We’re used to it,” Sam assured him, slipping around Dean to get to the right side of the bed like usual.

“That’s my  _ point _ , y’idjits. Your daddy should be getting you separate rooms or at least beds by this age. I mean, you’re what? Fourteen and eighteen?”

“‘Bout to be,” she agreed. “Sometime this summer.” She didn’t actually have any idea when her birthday was, but they’d thought she’d been about a year and a half old when they got her in November, so summer it was. They’d marked it as the twenty-fourth of July, the exact opposite of Dean’s.

“Just seems wrong,” he grumbled. “Well, I’ve only got the one extra room, so there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“It’s all good, Bobby,” Dean interrupted. “‘Sides, we both sleep better this way.”

He wasn’t making it up for Bobby’s sake either. They’d gotten their fair share of comments and awkward conversations for it, a good portion of them from Dad, though he’d given up the crusade when Dean pointed out that he hadn’t actually offered to get a room with another bed, but the only time either of them could sleep past a couple hours was curled up with the other. She s’posed it was kinda what they got when Dean’d been tasked with protecting her since he was five. He didn’t trust anybody else with her safety, barely even trusted Dad with it, and that attitude had rubbed off on her fast. She only really felt safe when he was right there beside her.

“Whatever you say, son,” he allowed. “Now, Eugene’s gonna get here round nine tomorrow morning, so you kids better be up to see your daddy leave, ‘cause I won’t be up to wake you.”

She and Dean shared a bitten down sort of smile. “We’ll be up, sir,” she told him.

He nodded, clapping Dean on the shoulder and kissing the top of her head like he always did. “‘Night, kids.”

“‘Night, Bobby,” they chorused.

“Nine,” Sam repeated, throwing herself down on the bed and laughing. “I don’t think we’ve slept in to nine maybe ever, ‘specially when Dad’s with us.”

“You used to,” Dean corrected her. “When you were little. Like toddler kinda little. You couldn’t wake up for anything. I’d have to pack everything up and carry you wherever we were going.”

She flushed. “Fine, we haven’t slept that late since I remember.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Whaddya say, sleep in ‘til seven tomorrow, train ‘til eight-thirty, make breakfast for when Eugene gets here?”

“Sounds good to me. Can we run the trail by the lake again, De? It’s always so pretty this time of year.”

“Fine,” he sighedd. They both knew she was the runner of the family; he was faster from extra years of practice and half a foot of height, but she was the one who actually enjoyed long distance runs. “Get up, you’re pinning the covers down.”

She pouted- the bed at Bobby’s was more comfortable than any of the ones in motels- but got up anyway so he could get in.    


“Close your eyes,” she told him, grabbing an oversized shirt and a clean pair of underwear from her duffle bag. She waited until he had rolled over with his face buried in his pillow before she put them on, brushed her hair- which really was getting pretty long, it was past her chin by now, even in its usual tight curls- and slipped into bed. “You can stop that now,” she added with a laugh as he stayed face down even once she was under the covers.

He rolled over, but he rolled towards her, practically crushing her as he took over her half of the bed. 

“Jerk,” she told him firmly, trying not to laugh as she wrapped her legs around him like a vice and rolled them over to his side, just like he’d taught her when they were wrestling.

“Oh, you are  _ on _ , bitch.”

They play fought for a few more minutes before they both collapsed onto their respective sides of the bed, shoulders shaking with laughter and the sheets damp from sweat. Between training and hours of frantic researching, they were too exhausted to fight for very long, and they were asleep within minutes of settling down and closing their eyes, Sam curled against Dean’s chest and his arm around her shoulders.

__________

“I’m thinking pancakes,” Sam announced, stepping back to fold her arms across her chest, looking at the meager offerings of Bobby’s pantry. “I’m pretty sure he has just barely everything for pancakes.”

Dean nodded. “Hand me the stuff,” he ordered, grabbing a bowl from the cabinet. 

“How do you have all this shit memorized?” she had to ask when he started measuring out the flour just by eyeing it. 

“Language. Pancakes are easy,” he dismissed. “And you love pancakes. I learned pretty quick.”

That seemed to be the answer to every question she asked. Anything he learned, he did because Dad made him learn or to make her happy. She wondered if there was anything in his life he’d done just for himself.

“I’m gonna cook up some fruit,” she decided. “Bobby doesn’t keep syrup or anything around the house.”

Dean nodded, a little too distracted by mixing up the batter to hear what she was saying. “Turn on some music, too, will you?”

She nodded and headed over to Bobby’s collection of tapes, and she started flipping through them. It was too early for Zeppelin, too quiet for ACDC- oh, perfect. Two minutes later had Dean performing the most overdramatic rendition of Juke Box Hero that she could possibly imagine, holding a spatula like a microphone.

“Can we go over to the school today?” she asked after a minute, hopping up on the counter beside the stove to stir the fruit. “It’d be nice to start in a day or two.”

“I will never understand how you look forward to school, Sammy,” he told her. “How’d I end up related to such a damn nerd?” She smacked him right across the chest for that one. “Fine, fine, we can go over later.”

“Can you go, too?”

He frowned. “Of course I’ll go, that’s what I just said I’d do.”

She rolled her eyes. “Go to  _ school _ , De. Enroll for the rest of your senior year.”

He let out a long, weary sort of sigh. “Why would I need to do that?”

“So you could have your high school diploma?” she suggested. “It’s an accomplishment, you’d feel good. And you can get better jobs with a diploma.”

“I’m a hunter, Sammy. This is it for me.”

“There’s girls at a high school?” she tried. “I’m gonna be at the high school? Come on, Dean, it’s two months.”

“Girls… you make a good point with that one,” he allowed. “I’ll think about it, okay?”

“Thanks, De.”

Eugene arrived a few minutes later, while Sam was scrubbing the dishes shiny and Dean was stacking the pancakes onto four plates, then pulling out another when he heard Bobby coming down the hall. Sam immediately bolted from the kitchen when she saw Eugene arrive, running at him to tackle him in a hug.

She wasn’t in general a very touchy feely person, honestly she was usually too awkward, but Eugene was one of her few exceptions. There was something about knowing that a person was the reason you were alive that made you want to hold onto them sometimes.

“Hey, kid,” he greeted, kissing her hair before messing it up. “And hey there, Dean, it’s good to see you again.”

“You, too, sir,” Dean replied, pausing in his breakfast preparation to shake the other man’s hand. “Hungry?”

“Starving.”

It was nice to catch up with him, but it was only a couple minutes later that Dad and Bobby got downstairs, glaring at each other in the way that made Sam and Dean both avert their eyes. The two men may have loved each other like brothers, but that didn’t stop them from hating each other’s guts. 

“‘Morning, sir,” they chorused, handing plates stacked high with pancakes and cooked strawberry topping to each of the men and letting them take seats at the kitchen table. 

“‘Morning, Dean, Sam,” he nodded, his voice still sounding gruff from sleeping in. “Eugene, good to see you again.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen them all in a room together,” Sam whispered. “I’m a little terrified, I gotta admit.”

Dean huffed. “Generally a good guess if you’re ever not sure how to feel, given our lives and all. I mean, any one of ‘em could kill us both in seconds.”

“I think we’d hold up for at least a couple minutes,” she argued.

“Maybe like… one minute. Should we just eat up here, or…?”

“Dunno,” Sam replied. “There’s no room for a fifth chair at Bobby’s little table- hell, the three of them are taking up just about the whole thing- so I guess so.”

Sam hopped up on the counter beside where Dean was leaning back against it, and they let their minds wander as they watched the men going about their mornings. Eugene and Bobby clearly knew each other, but they had never actually seen them together, and God was it weird to see them getting along like old friends. It was also somewhat kind of entirely hilarious to see Eugene acting as the moderator between Dad and Bobby.

“Kids, get over here,” Bobby called, cutting off something Dad was saying under his breath. “Can’t have you missin’ your daddy on his last morning in town.”

Sam winced at the sheer level of passive aggression in Bobby’s tone, but she followed Dean over to the table anyways.  _ We can share? _ she offered with a tilt of her head. 

He shook his head.  _ We won’t fit anymore _ , he replied with a look up and down at her and then himself. He sat down and shrugged,  _ ‘s’just Eugene and Bobby, _ he was telling her. 

_ Fair enough _ , she supposed, sitting down on his lap and swinging her legs around so she wouldn’t block his sight. “You good?”

“You weigh like a hundred pounds,” he told her through a mouthful of pancakes. 

“I do  _ not _ ,” she argued, trying to ignore the weird looks Bobby and Eugene were giving them.

“I can literally squat you, Sammy,” he reminded her. “Wanna call me strong, or wanna admit you’re a midget?”

“I’m not even dignifying that with a response.”

“That  _ was _ a response, dumbass.”

“Jerk.”

“Bitch.”

“Kids.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“We should head out pretty soon if we want to get there in time to do some work tonight,” Eugene announced, glancing at her and Dean apologetically.

Dad took a long breath and turned to Dean. “You know the drill. Don’t pick up unless it rings once first, you do what Bobby tells you and you don’t stay out late without letting him know, keep up with your training, and most important-”

“Watch out for Sammy, I know,” Dean finished.

“Don’t get smart with me, boy,” he warned.    


“I’m not, sir,” he replied, and Sam could see his jaw tensing. “I know what I’m doing.”

It was a drill they’d gone though as long as Sam could remember. Lock the doors, close the blinds, don’t pick up the phone, do what Bobby or Eugene or Ellen or Jim says to do, and the number one rule, the most important one, the one that Dad would never stop drilling even if they all knew that Dean was never gonna forget it- watch out for her.

“Good luck on the hunt, sir,” Dean continued. “Call if you need us to research anything.”

“Be safe,” Sam added, just like she always did. It wasn’t like it changed anything for him to hear it from her, but she couldn’t just not say it. If something happened, it was best to end on a good note.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you thought, and check out my tumblr @venus-ink!


	4. Chapter 4

“We’re going down to the school to get Sam set up,” Dean was saying to Bobby in the other room. “If all works out, we’ll be back at four this afternoon or so, if not, she’ll start tomorrow.”

“And you, boy?”

“I’m thinkin’ I might want to go back, too, if that’s alright with you, sir.”

Bobby huffed. “I ain’t gonna stop you from going to school, Dean.”

“No, I know, I know, I just know you said you needed help in the shop and-”

“I manage all the rest of the year, don’t I?” was his reply. “You’re always welcome in my shop, son, but not at the expense of your education.”

“Thanks, Bobby.”

“Say, what, uh, what made you change your mind?”

Dean took a moment to respond. “Sammy says you can get better jobs when you got your diploma,” was all he said.

“Thinkin’ about somethin’ other than hunting?”

Dean flat out laughed at that. “Nah, sir. But I’m sick of hustling pool everywhere we go, y’know? Guilt’s starting to get to me or whatever. Figure we’ll be better off if I can get a better job next time Dad leaves us in one place for a while.”

“You get jobs in every town?” Bobby asked incredulously. “Doesn’t your daddy leave you kids money?”

“Uh, usually, sir. But he doesn’t always know how long he’s gonna be gone for, and we don’t always have the cash on hand, and not everything we want to buy falls under necessities. Works out better if I have some income coming in.”

“Every next word out of your mouth makes me want to rip your daddy a damn new one, boy,” Bobby told him, shaking his head. “But alright. Good luck up at the school.”

“Thank you, sir.”

She heard his footsteps coming towards her so she rushed back to the other side of the room and made a show of lacing up her shoes when he came over. 

“You ready, Sammy?”

She nodded, tossing him Dad’s leather jacket that he had left behind, Dean’s favorite jacket. “I’m ready.”

The drive to the school was only a couple minutes, short enough that they could have run it in no time, even walked it if they wanted to, but long enough that Dean liked to take the car anyway, just to prove that he could.

Sioux River High was a school Sam had only been to a handful of times. Middle schools ended half an hour after high schools, so Dean would pick her up from there whenever they were going to school at Bobby’s. 

She’d been in a couple times for concerts and performances and stuff, and she always went with Dean to the football games in fall. One of the local boys had even taken her to a dance once. But she had never been before as a student.

The building was just how she remembered, two stories of squat brick in the most unnecessarily complex design she’d ever seen in a school. It had started out with one building but they had just kept adding onto it in all different directions until it had become some kind of labyrinth of dirty white floors and dirtier white walls. It smelled like a gas station. It made her smile.

There were new counselors, they quickly discovered, seeing as nobody had recognized either of them yet and they’d passed a good ten people in the front office. Dean took them up to the student services offices, up on the second floor in the back corner of hallway 2M. It didn’t look like anybody had gone up there in a long time.

“Can I help you?” asked a pretty blonde woman who popped out of an office the moment they crossed the threshold. “Aw, is that your little brother?”

Sam cursed under her breath, and Dean cuffed her right upside the head, clearly biting back a laugh.

“Hiya, sweetheart,” Dean greeted, turning on the charm until Sam was dying of second hand embarrassment. “I’m tryna get my little sister, Sammy, here enrolled for the next couple months.”

She looked a little surprised but smiled to reveal the whitest teeth Sam had ever seen. “I can do that,” she agreed. “You have your transcripts?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sam rushed to reply, pushing past Dean to hand her the folder. 

She took the folder and started flipping through it. “What brings you two to town then?”

“Military family,” Dean told her with a shrug. “Our dad dropped us here for a couple of months while he’s off on duty.”

“Well, I hope you enjoy your stay at least.” At least she sounded honest. “This is a lot of schools, Sammy, right?” she added, turning to Sam.

“Sam,” she corrected. “Dad, uh, gets moved around a lot.”

“I gotta say, I’m impressed then,” the woman continued, but she had turned around to look more at Dean by then. “Straight A’s over the course of twenty-five schools. Only thing missing is the rest of eighth grade?”

Sam gulped. “Um.”

Dean cut in smoothly. “You see how well she’s doin’. We were hoping to get her moved up for the rest of the year. That’s okay, right?” He flashed a hopeful smile, and Sam was about to roll her eyes when she saw the way the woman was smiling back. She mimed hurling where only Dean could see.

“Yeah, I’m sure we can figure something out,” she assured them. “Do you have time to take a few tests, honey?” she asked, finally giving Sam her attention.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Alright then. Let me just pull up a few placement tests… there we go!” she told her, long nails clacking loudly on her keyboard. “I’ll go grab these off the printer and then I’ll set you up to take them.”

Sam waited until she was out of the room to give Dean a look. “You can’t flirt with the counselors if you’re gonna be a student here, De.”

“I’m eighteen,” he replied indignantly. “I can do what I damn well please. ‘Sides, she looks right out of college. It’s not like it’s weird.”

“Everything you do is weird,” Sam corrected.

“You’re just jealous,” he said, reaching up to smooth his hair as he watched his reflection in the computer screen.

Sam looked over at the pretty woman. “Yeah,” she agreed with a sigh. “Maybe a bit.”

“Aw, come on, Sammy,” he teased. “You can find a girl. You know what they say- anywhere you go, there’s at least one girl who likes midgets.”

She whipped around to face her brother. “Who the  _ fuck _ says th-” She broke off as the woman returned.

She set Sam up at a desk in her office, but she left the door open as it was, so it didn’t do anything to muffle their conversation. The test was pretty much the same as all the other ones she took when she got to a new school- the questions got harder and harder as the test went on, and wherever you just straight up had to stop would show which levels of what you belonged in, only this time it was for grades.

“So anyway, I don’t think I introduced myself,” Dean was saying in the other room- quietly, thank God for small mercies, but saying it all the same. “I’m Dean, Dean Winchester.”

“Briana,” she replied. “My, uh,  _ friends _ usually call me Bri, though.”

“It’s nice to meet you then, Bri.”

She banged her head directly against the table.

“Everything good in there, Sammy?” Dean called, and she could  _ hear _ the shit eating grin in his voice.

“Just fine,” she called back cheerily.

“You over at the college then?” Briana asked. “I just graduated last spring.”

“Nah, I, uh, I’m not quite there,” he admitted. “I’m eighteen, but Sammy here’s trying to get me to finish up my diploma, so you’re probably gonna be seeing me around if I give in…” he paused, shaking his head, “which I will. Kid gives me the puppy dog eyes like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Oh, I can  _ so _ see that. You two are close?”

“Yeah. It’s been just us for a while, what with Dad, uh, in the service.”

She tuned them out after that. Thinking about Dad was not how one went about passing a test. 

She finished up the English one fast enough; there were a handful of questions she couldn’t figure out, mostly just vocab stuff she hadn’t learned, but it was all pretty easy. She didn’t have a test for history because all freshman had to take American History as it was, and nothing she could do would put her anything else, not that she cared to try. She tried the science tests next, feeling damn confident about her chemistry and biology but barely knowing shit about physics. She desperately hoped they wouldn’t stick her in physics freshman year.

She had saved math for last since it was the one she was the most confident about. Clearly the school didn’t have very high expectations if the hardest things on the test were quadratics and trig identities.

She figured it had been a little over an hour by the time she went back to the main office, holding the scantrons in one hand and the packets in the other. The main office where her brother and Briana were making out against the desk. She let out a long sigh and cleared her throat keeping her eyes shut tight until she heard them scrambling apart.

“Sorry to bother,” she told them, that innocent type of sarcasm that she may not have picked up on but Dean definitely did. “I’ve finished the tests.”

“Right, right, of course,” Briana rushed to respond, smoothing her skirt with one hand and her hair with the other. “Our scanner is broken, so I’m gonna have to check these by hand if that’s alright.”

“Of course,” Sam agreed. “So, did you two get Dean all set up for senior year? His senior year of high school that is?” She got a sadistic kind of pleasure from the deep shade of red on Briana’s cheeks.

“Aw, lighten up, Sammy,” Dean told her, and she could hear the order underneath his sheepish manner. Whatever. “And yes, we did.”

She watched Briana stack Sam’s tests with the answer keys and hold them up to the light. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said after she had checked the last one. “You’ve tested into freshman year, easy. Hell, you could be a junior if you wanted.”

“I think we’ll pass on that one,” Dean answered for her, predicting her stammering before she got the opportunity to show it off. “Can’t have competition, you feel me?”

“I’m sure she will,” Sam muttered. Dean’s grip on her arm tightened.

“Well, pick some elective courses, would you?” she offered. She hadn’t heard Sam’s comment, but Sam doubted she had missed the room feeling like it had dropped a few degrees. “What language have you been taking again, sweetie?”

“Spanish, I’m in level four” Sam answered distractedly, scanning the course list. “But I’d like to take Latin as well.”

“Do you know any Latin already?” she asked, a bit hesitant. “It didn't say anything about it in your transcripts, and it would be hard to join the class at the end of the year.”

“Certe Latinam scio,” Sam scoffed. “Me ipsam duxi aetatulam. Latinam scio poti spere scire potes. Rogo ut in classem ponas.” She smiled. “Benigna.”

“You… speak Latin,” she said slowly. “Well, I’ll be damned. I’ll put you in the highest level- if you have any trouble for some reason, I’ll switch it.”

“Thanks.”

The most awkward part of a new school was introductions. Not with the other kids really- making friends, that was fine or whatever- but teachers always felt a need to make her introduce herself and tell the class fun facts about her childhood and her favorite ice cream flavor and stupid shit like that.

“This is Sam Winchester,” Mr. Connell was announcing as she stood awkwardly in front of the blackboard with her ratty old backpack in one hand. “Sam, would you like to say something to the class?”

Dean was probably saying something cool right now. Probably smirked and told the teacher nah, he’d rather not, before finding an opportunity to call somebody sweetheart and taking a seat by the most popular girl in the room.

“No, thanks,” she mumbled, shuffling to the only open seat in the room, between a girl who chewed gum so loudly that Sam’s hand itched for her knife, and a boy who was watching her so closely she had her hand wrapped around the handle by the time she had sat down. She pulled out the book and sighed. English level three, honors. She could do that.

She was glad she had moved up a year, she really was. It would get her done with high school a year earlier, it would be a little less boring in the short term, she’d get to be in the same school as Dean. All good things. But she didn’t know anybody in the ninth grade. She had gotten to know a couple of people who were in eighth grade, where she was supposed to be, and Dean had a few friends in his year who she would have recognized, but as a freshman she knew  _ nobody _ . It was gonna be a long couple of months.

She found Dean outside the school already when she left that afternoon, pressing some dark haired girl against the side of the car. Honestly, she’d make some joke about not knowing how they were related, had they actually been related of course. No, she could definitely tell that they did not share whatever part of the gene pool gave him the ability to make every girl in a five mile radius go insane.

She opted not to break them up just yet, pulling out her book, the Austen she had started before they left, and decided to camp out on one of the benches by the buses. She’d find some way to get back at him later.


	5. Chapter 5

“ _ Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus. Omnis satanica…  _ fuck _. Omnis satanica… potestas? Omnis… _ ”

It made her want to bang her head against a wall. She was damn good at Latin, and she enjoyed it, too, sure, but there was a difference between thinking it was cool to speak a dead language and wanting to spend her mornings- and afternoons, and evenings, and nights- memorizing exorcisms at Dad’s request.

_ Request _ , her brain mocked. Demand, more like. John Winchester didn’t ask for things, it just wasn’t his way. He would bark orders at his children like they were soldiers under his command, and he would be obeyed.

No one liked John Winchester when he wasn’t obeyed.

Which was what brought Sam to Bobby’s library on the prettiest Sunday morning she’d seen in a while, rather than out in the shop with Dean or down at the lake with the other kids in the town. Oh, how she longed for the lake, the burning sun with only a few spots of shade under the trees by the edge, and the shimmering water and the fish swimming around, the groups of other kids, most everybody between her age and Dean’s. Normal kids, who had clubs after school instead of training, went to proms and homecomings and football games, who had dads who didn’t up and leave every two weeks until he gave up and dragged them to the next crappy motel room.

She had friends there, in Sioux Falls, or familiar faces, at least. They’d ended up staying with Bobby once a year or so, and by the time Sam was thirteen, everybody was pretty used to Dean and her coming around for a bit. It was awkward, sure, to try to explain what brought them there that time around, why Dad left again, and why he’d leave them with the town drunk, but they liked her, and that was enough for Sam. 

It had been nice to see Eugene that morning at least. He’d always been protective of her, seeing as he’d been the one to pull her out of the rubble, as it was, so he was pretty much somewhere between her pseudo uncle and her third dad. Dean liked him, too, and the man was always there to offer the approval Dad never did and share a beer with him and give Sam a new fancy knife that he picked up somewhere, and she loved him for that.

She turned back to the page where the words seemed to be taunting her, and for the millionth time, she wished he could be swimming, pretending she was a normal kid for just a day. She grabbed the book, switching off the lights and heading out to the shop where she knew Dean was working.

“Hiya, Sammy,” she heard the familiar voice call as she walked out, but she couldn’t pinpoint the source. “Black Mustang at ten o’clock,” came next.

It was easy to find him after that, and Sam followed his voice to the car, checking to make sure it was safe before hopping up on the hood, wincing slightly at the burn of hot metal on bare skin.

“How’s the Latin going?” her older brother asked, his head popping out from where he was laying in the front seat, his feet pressed flat against the roof and a hammer now loose in his right hand.

“Long,” she replied, trying to keep the whine out of her tone. “Twenty-four lines for one of ‘em, thirty-two for the other. I have the longer one memorized by now, but the shorter one doesn’t…” she trailed off, gesturing vaguely. “It doesn’t flow as well.”

Dean hummed something in understanding. 

“What’s got you workin’ on this car?” Sam asked, changing the subject to something other than the work she wasn’t doing.

Dean grinned at that, and Sam felt herself smiling back, even though she didn’t know why. “Bobby says I can keep her,” he announced proudly. “Says if I fix her up before Dad gets back, she can be all mine. Or maybe I could give her to Dad if he’d let me have the Impala. Either one. But we never really know when Dad’s gonna pop back up, so I’m tryna get it done fast.”

“How would that even work, having two cars?” she had to ask, wincing as she realized how negative she sounded. “I mean, that’s great that you’re gonna have one, really, I just… y’know, we drive all over the place at all hours.”

“Dunno,” Dean shrugged. “We’ll figure it out I guess. If Dad lets me keep it. But think how nice it would be to have a car next time Dad goes on a hunt- I mean, I’d have more options for jobs, I could drive you to school no matter where we are.”

“That does sound nice,” she agreed. “Say, how’s it going with that girl, uh, Mandy, was it?”

He nodded. “Okay, I guess. She’s fun and all, kinda boring though. And she seems like she wants some kinda serious relationship or whatever, so-” he shrugged. “She wants me to meet her  _ parents _ , man. I don’t do parents. So I dunno, I’ll probably break up with her. Always more fish in the sea and all that.”

“You’re gonna run out of girls one of these days, y’know.”

“Not possible,” he denied, looking almost a bit offended at the suggestion. “There’s way more girls than I could ever date.”

She gasped in mock outrage. “Are you admitting that there’s a limit to your ability to be a total slut?”

He glared. “Shut it, Sammy.”

“Jerk.”

“Bitch.”

She had the second exorcism memorized by the end of the afternoon.

There was some kind of freshman assembly the next day, something about bullying and peer pressure that not a single soul in that auditorium was going to listen to. All the counselors were up at the front by the principal, and Sam couldn’t help but shoot a sarcastic sort of smile at Briana.

She slipped into a seat near the back, a couple seats down from a group of boys she sort of recognized from the past few years of visits. Honestly, what was an assembly for if not time to finish her homework so they could go out after school? At least all she had was math; it wouldn’t be too hard to finish up the worksheets with minimal light.

“Sam, right?” came a voice that jolted her out of her focus.

“Yeah?”

“I’m Abigail,” the girl added, holding out a hand. “We have math and history together?”

“Oh, uh, right,” Sam replied dumbly. “Nice to meet you.”

She smiled, a wide grin that made Sam kinda want to smile back. “You, too. Can I sit here? All my friends got stuck up near the front, and I was kind of hoping to study through this whole thing. English test tomorrow and all that.”

Well, now she was definitely smiling back. She held up her math homework to show the other girl. “Go ahead.”

She sat down beside her and pushed her hair behind her ear with her pen.

“Gumballs?” Sam blurted.

“Huh?"

She could already feel her face heating. “Your, uh, your earrings,” she clarified. “Are those little gumball machines?”

“Oh! Yea, they are,” she said, ducking her head a kinda sheepishly. “I know they’re kinda dumb, but-”

“I like them.”

And she was smiling again. “Thanks.”

Sam finished her homework as she had intended, but she also learned that Abigail had moved to Sioux Falls two years ago from Texas, that it was just her and her mom after her dad left, that she hadn’t been down to the lake because she had never actually learned how to swim, and that every Wednesday afternoon, she went into town after school to study at the ice cream shop because her mom worked late. 

She also learned that Abigail either wasn’t all that close to the friends she had, or was even more of a social butterfly than Dean. Not that it took very much convincing to get her to agree to get ice cream after school. 

“I just need to go tell my brother, if that’s cool,” she told Abigail sheepishly. “Otherwise he’d just be waiting around in the parking lot.”

Which he was, with his hands in the back pockets of a girl she’d never seen before.

Sam coughed. “Dean.”

He detached his face from the girl’s neck, but they didn’t step apart. “What’s up?”

“I’m going into town with a friend,” she told him. “Can you pick me up in a couple hours? We’ll be at the ice cream shop.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “Four-thirty, five-ish?” She nodded. “Sounds good.” He finally pulled away from the girl. “Aw, come’re, gimme a hug.”

Sam let him wrap an arm around her shoulders and mess up her hair for the fiftieth time that day. “Just remember she has a house, too, okay?” she reminded him sarcastically, pocketing the couple dollar bills he’d handed her, and the girl burst out laughing before poorly disguising it as a cough.

“Whatever you say, Sammy,” he agreed, but she could tell he meant it at least.

“Oh, this is your little sister then?” the girl spoke up. “I’m Audrey,” she told Sam.

“Sam,” she replied. Well, she had introduced herself directly- that was a step up from completely ignoring her like most of his girlfriends did. “I shouldn’t leave Abigail waiting,” she added, seeing the get-out-of-here look Dean was shooting her.

“See you around!”

“See ya later, Sammy.”

“She’s adorable,” she heard Audrey tell Dean when she probably thought Sam was out of hearing range.

“Don’t let hear you say that, it’ll go to her head,” Dean warned.

“Oh? No room in the house for two egos the size of yours?” Audrey teased.

“Exactly,” he agreed. “See, you get it.”

“ _ That’s _ your brother?” Abigail asked, suddenly appearing at her side. 

“Yeah, that’s Dean.”

“He’s, like, the most popular guy here.  _ And _ he’s new. I think half my friends are in love with him,” she confided.

“And you?” Sam had to ask. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d have a friend with a crush on Dean, and it wouldn’t be the last, it would just be annoying.

“Uh- no,” Abigail denied, sounding a bit surprised by the question and her cheeks flushing. “Guys aren’t really my thing, y’know?”

Was this what the whole butterflies in the stomach thing meant? “Same here,” Sam told her, keeping her eyes on her shoes, ratty old chucks that seemed even worse next to Abigails strappy pink sandals.

Sam had only been to the ice cream shop once or twice, mostly just on the way out of town when Dean had a few dollars to spare and was in a good mood. It was run by an older couple who owned a farm up the road, and all the ice cream was homemade, so nothing could really beat it.

It was  _ nice _ to be back, it was nice to be normal. The old couple even remembered her, not by name or anything, but they recognized her all the same.

It was… it was  _ nice _ to spend the afternoon sharing an ice cream with a girl, a girl with pretty pink sandals and earrings that looked like gumball machines. It was nice to sit on the wall and study together, even if she knew Dean would never let her up about the fact that she was out all afternoon with a girl and actually studied. 

But Abigail was smart, and as much as she loved Dean, he tended not to go for the smartest girls in school. 

“Sammy?” Dean asked that night, after a few minutes of lying still, listening to the wind behind the open window and watching the little bit of moonlight that got through the trees to their floor.

“Yea, De?”

“Why do you like it here so much?”

She frowned. “You don’t?”

“Nah, I do.” He paused. “You’re alive here.”

“I like it here,” she said simply, shrugging awkwardly under the covers. “I like that I know people here and they know me. I like that we go to the lake after school and you get to work on your cars. I like that Bobby doesn’t make us train 24/7 like Dad does. It feels more normal, y’know?”

“Spending your days pretending we’re not hunters?” he teased, but it just sounded sad.

“Nah,” she denied. “It’s just a better balance here. Hunting, normal life. Here we got both. ‘Sides, Bobby’s the only hunter I kinda…  _ get _ .”

She could tell he was rolling his eyes, even from behind her. “You gonna explain that one, Sammy?” 

“He, y’know, doesn’t kill everybody,” she mumbled, twisting her hands in her old shirt. “I mean he could, obviously, we know he’s good, but he doesn’t. He still runs his shop, he stays here just about all year round. He’s got friends, he’s got a life, he just helps hunters whenever they need it. More behind the scenes kinda thing. Research. Backing up stories. I could… I could do that one day. I think."

“You wanna be the next Bobby?”

She nodded. Then she shook her head. “I  _ want _ to be a lawyer. But yeah, I’d be the next Bobby."

“Maybe you’ll be a lawyer the way Bobby’s a mechanic.”

“Maybe,” she agreed, though a bit reluctantly. It wasn’t really worth entertaining those kinds of ideas. Hunters were hunters, she’d heard it from Dad enough.

“Nah, listen. Who needs help getting out of shit more than hunters?” he asked. “No one. We’re tangled in the law every other week. Hell, you’d have a job just getting me outta trouble.”

“Already is my job, dumbass,” she muttered. 

“See? You’re already halfway there.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter where the graphic depictions of violence tag is first relevant, as with the john winchester's A+ parenting tag, so definitely some trigger warnings and proceed with cautions

“I’m not leaving,” Sam repeated, tightening her grip on her duffle bag. Her knuckles had turned white and then red again around the rough canvas, and she was sure her face was the same.

“I wasn’t asking you a goddamn question,” Dad warned, that monotone sort of anger creeping into his voice that would have sent her running before, the sort that threatened the heat underneath that he was barely holding back.

“And I wasn’t putting in a goddamn request.” Her voice shook slightly, and she drew in a deep breath. “My exams are next week, and so are Dean’s, and this is the third time I’ve had them moved up for us. They can’t be any sooner, and I’m staying to finish them.”

“No, what you’re doing is what I’m telling you to do.”

She swallowed hard. “No, I’m not.”

“Sam,” Dean ordered, grabbing her bag and tossing it next to his. “Just please don’t make this harder.”

“I suggest you listen to your brother.”

“Of course you do,” she shot back before she could stop herself. “He’s your good little fucking soldier, right? Always follows your orders without question, puts his goddamn blind faith in you no matter where you are and whether or not you give a shit about coming back.”

Dean looked like he’d been slapped. “It’s called being a good son.”

She turned to Dean and her voice softened, just slightly. “It’s called Stockholm syndrome.” She turned back to Dad. “You know how most parents feel when their kid stays top of the class through twenty-five schools, skips a grade, and wants to work hard and pass her exams? Proud.”

“We’re hunters, Sam, that’s going to take priority sometimes. Sorry you can’t wrap your head around the fact that the world doesn’t fucking revolve around you.”   


“I never said it revolved around me, I said you can leave it alone for a week so I don’t ruin my chances of having a future.”

He was shouting now. “This  _ is _ your future, Sammy. Hunting chooses you, so you might as well get used to it before you get yourself killed.”

“Don’t call me Sammy. And there’s always a choice. Sorry you regret yours.”

Her head hit the tiled wall with a crack, and his arm pressing against her neck wasn’t helping with the stars she was already seeing. “Those things killed my wife,” he reminded her darkly, his breath hot on her face.

She raised her chin defiantly, her dark eyes meeting his green ones, green like Dean’s but too hard, too cold. She let out a harsh, choked sort of laugh. “Oh, trust me, it wasn’t Mary’s death that tore this family apart. That was all you,  _ sir _ .”

She had expected the fist hurtling into her jaw, but there was nothing she could have done about it as it was. She groaned as her head hit the wall again, and she felt like a bobblehead with her head swinging towards her chest like it was filled with bricks.

She forced herself upright, choking in as much air as she could with the arm on her throat blocking her airways. Her jaw was dislocated, she could tell, from the way she couldn’t quite move it, and she squeezed her eyes shut as she shoved it back into place like she had done for Dad and Dean so many times, spitting blood on the floor and right on his shoes.

There seemed to be three of him now, blurring in and out of focus above her. “Go ahead,” she challenged, talking right over Dean’s screaming at him to stop. “You’re only proving me right.”

The next blow, her cheekbone this time, forced a wrangled sob from her throat, but she wouldn’t back down. “Should I tell them, do you think?” she asked, still laughing almost deliriously. “When I go in to take my exam on Monday with my face still all fucked up. Wonder if they’d all agree that I think the world revolves around me.”

His fist connected with her eye, and she couldn’t stop the tears pouring out of it.

“Poor John Winchester,” she mocked, gritting her teeth into a smile. “His wife died fourteen years ago, and now he beats his children when he’s drunk.”

“Shut up about my wife,” he ordered, the grip on her throat tightening as another blow hit her mouth, and even in her practically drugged state she couldn’t help but pray that he hadn’t knocked out a tooth. “You would be dead if I didn’t take you in and raise your ungrateful ass.”

She just wanted to stop talking, to stop provoking him. It wouldn’t do anything, it never did, but  _ god _ , she couldn’t stop herself. “You mean if  _ Dean _ hadn’t raised me. My first word was Dean, my first steps were towards Dean. He’s closer to a father than you could ever hope to be.”

Dean was begging now, and she couldn’t tell who he was even talking to, just begging for it to stop. She wondered how much of her face was left unmarked by then. She felt like her head was on fire, and she was pretty certain it was a concussion by the way she could barely stand straight up without her head weighing her down.

“Dad-” he broke off in something he would never admit was a sob. “Dad, you’re gonna kill her. You’re gonna kill Sammy, Dad, please.”

She’d never seen him look so helpless, so lost, that wild, frantic look he got whenever she was hurt, but there was something in there she hadn’t seen before, some snarling thing behind his eyes, snapping its teeth as he held it on such a tight leash she couldn’t help but worry it was gonna break.

_ You know I can’t do anything else _ , he was telling her.  _ Doesn’t mean I don’t want to. _

_ I know.  _

Dad watched her for a moment longer, and she braced herself for the incoming blow, baring her teeth like a dog and keeping her eyes on his. His eyes were so filled with disgust, disdain, disappointment, that she wanted to look away, to stare at her shoes like an ashamed little kid, or look at Dean- god, she just wanted to see Dean- but she held steady.

Finally, he pulled away, and let her slump to the ground without his hold on her neck, and Dean was by her side in an instant. “That’s it, Sammy,” he told her, his big brother voice back on. “Head between your knees, okay? Deep breaths. You’re okay, I got you. You’re okay.”

He climbed to his feet once she had assured him she was alright.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he barked, his trembling voice surprisingly strong. “You’re going to take a bus to Denver, or a train, or a plane, or borrow one of Bobby’s cars, or you’re gonna learn how to fly real fuckin’ fast. If you need help, you’re gonna call someone else. Me and Sammy are staying here for the next week or two, however long it takes to finish everything up, and then we’re gonna drive out to meet you, and you’re going to be there, you hear me? For once in your life, you’re gonna be there.”

The tension in the room was thick enough to cut with a knife.

When Dad spoke again, it was softly, the door was already open and his bag was in his hand, but the keys were hanging on the hook. “You were wrong, the part about you being a good son.”

She couldn’t tell if the slamming door was a threat or a relief.

“I’m sorry,” she told him immediately once she was sure Dad was gone. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I-”

“If you say you’re sorry again, I’m gonna smack you.” He winced. “Bad timing on that one. Alright, what’s the damage?”

She took a long breath. “My jaw was dislocated, left side impact, my cheekbone is snapped, right side, both my eyes are black, as I’m sure you can see- and actually do we have any ice? They’re starting to swell- and my lip is split in at least two places. Possible concussion, bruising on my neck, but I don’t think anything super serious. Hurts to swallow, but I didn’t black out, so I don’t the pressure was strong enough to leave anything lasting.”

“Good girl,” he murmured, kissing her forehead. “I’m gonna go get you some ice, okay?”

She’d hurt him, she knew it, even if he wouldn’t ever tell her. She’d gone too far, and she’d lost sight of the lines she promised herself she wouldn’t cross, no matter how upset she got. It was a struggle to keep her eyes open, but if she really had a concussion, then she wasn’t supposed to sleep, not yet at least.

But maybe just a minute wouldn’t hurt…

“Hey, hey,” Dean was saying, shaking her softly. “Let’s get you to bed, alright, sleeping beauty?” He tried to pull her up, but she was dead weight on the floor, and finally he gave in, picking her up bridal style and carrying her right up the stairs to tuck her into bed with cold cloths and ice packs covering her face. “How often is it for concussions?” he asked. “Wake you up every hour or something?”

“That’s a myth,” she mumbled through the bag of ice on her mouth. “Wake me in two hours, then two hours after that, and as long as I can hold a basic conversation at both of those points, I’ll be fine. You’re supposed to rest after you’re injured.”

“How long?”

“I’ll be fine by tomorrow,” she assured him. “I just… really need to sleep.”

She was gone in minutes.

________

“You said you’d be here for the rest of the year, though.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam offered, wincing. “Shit changes, y’know?”

Telling Abi she was leaving was the hardest part. She was the only thing in Sioux Falls that Sam was really gonna miss, because she was the only part she was unlikely to ever have again. She’d be back eventually, spending a couple weeks with Bobby over summer or something, lots of towns had all the same shit as Sioux Falls, but none of them had Abi.

They were back at the ice cream shop after her history exam that Friday, sitting on the same back wall and swinging their feet, but this time was an ending, not a beginning. The exams had been easy enough, and she’d even gotten Dean to take the exams for his core classes so he’d get his diploma, and he might never admit it, but he really did look happy when he got his certificate that morning, and she’d been so so proud.

“Your dad’s getting restationed then?”

She nodded. “He got home last weekend. We were supposed to leave then, but I wanted to finish exams.”

“And is he why you’re wearing three pounds of concealer?” Abi asked, a sad smile pulling at her lips as she brushed a finger over Sam’s cheek.

Her hand came to her face instinctually to pull Abi’s off, wincing at the pressure on the mending bone. “I shouldn’t have provoked him,” she said finally.

God, she hated pity, but it’s all Abi’s eyes were full of. “It’s not your fault,” she corrected. “You know that, right? He shouldn’t be hitting you.”

Sam sighed. There was no good way to explain anything, not without spilling literally everything about their lives, and Abi didn’t deserve to know about the terrible things waiting in the dark. No one deserved a life like the one she and Dean had to live- she knew how hunters were made, and it was nothing but normal people who knew too much, normal people who got hurt.

“I crossed a line- a lot of lines,” she told her, trying to keep her voice soft. “I said things I had no right to say.” Abi frowned. “Dean’s mom,” she clarified, keeping her eyes on her ice cream. “I went too far, I knew it would make him angry. It’s alright, really.”

None of them particularly enjoyed it, but the easiest cover story was to say that Sam was Dad’s daughter but not Mary’s. It would have been hard to try to rewrite the tragedy of Mary’s death with what would have become her son, and she looked absolutely nothing like Mary, so most hunters they met along the way assumed she was the product of some affair, and that was a better story than the truth. She had told the same thing to Abi when she’d asked where her mom was.

“Whatever you said, he probably deserved it. When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow morning, early. We’re headed out to Denver.”

She rested her head on Sam’s shoulder. “I’m gonna miss you,” she whispered. 

“I’ll miss you, too.” She meant it, she really did. If she could have just stayed, just a bit longer, if she could have just been a normal kid with a normal family rather than the lot of fucked up freaks that they were, she could have stayed in Sioux Falls and taken Abi to the dance at the end of the year and to the carnival over summer, and everything else she wanted so desperately, but that wasn’t the life she led. She wondered which she’d miss more, Abi, or what a life where she could keep her would have looked like.

“Call,” Abi said suddenly. “Call me, please. Promise me.”

“I promise,” Sam agreed, the lie bitter on her tongue.

She couldn’t afford any more attachments. 


	7. Chapter 7

It was raining the morning they left; it had started out with a drizzle, the gross, sticky kind of humid that makes you want to pull your skin off, but by the time Sioux Falls was an hour in the rear view, water was pouring downright biblical. They’d flipped through the radio stations until there was some oldies station on, but nothing was good enough to play loud, and it wasn’t really as fun when the windows had to stay up.

She’d finished reading the book Dad needed them to cover before they got to Denver, all the lore on Tulpas, revised to accompany the sightings and hunts over the last thirty years. It was the driest book she’d ever had the displeasure of reading, but the information itself was actually pretty interesting, and it wasn’t like she had much of a choice. She owed it to Dean not to get in another fight  _ immediately _ upon arrival.

“How do you do it?” she asked, looking over at him. 

“Do what?”

“Just coast, town to town, no attachments, nothing- nobody- that you miss.”

He looked at her oddly. “Part of the job, Sammy.”

“But  _ how _ ? How do you just not feel it? Not want to stay anywhere?” She gestured at the open road in front of them, miles and miles of empty cornfields on either side and the thriving metropolis of Plainview, Nebraska, hoping it would better convey her meaning. “Is this all you want?”

He blew out a long breath, running a hand through his hair before letting it fall back on the wheel, nine and three like Dad taught them. “I just remind myself that it’s not worth it,” he said finally, and it sounded too heavy to be as simple as he said. “I stopped imagining that there was some beautiful life out there if I just waited for it somewhere. It’s not coming, not for me.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “I’m not hung up on it,” he told her, and she was surprised at how honest he sounded. “Life don’t just  _ come _ for anybody; you find it, and you make it. I’m never gonna get the opportunity to wait around and get all attached, so I just gotta look somewhere else.” He huffed a laugh and reached over to shove her shoulder. “‘Sides, I’ve had  _ you _ to raise. I didn’t have time for attachments.”

Her lips pressed together tight and she watched quite determinedly out the window. “So you’re saying I just need to be more attached to… hunting.”

“Hunting, travelling, your knives,  _ me _ ,” he agreed. “Get attached to what you got, and it moves around with you. Why do you think I love Baby so much? We get a new motel every other week, but we always have our car.”

That… that made an annoying amount of sense.

“Come on,” he teased, switching back to his usual one handed driving and grabbing her somewhat lukewarm coffee from her hand, “when you’re my age, you’re gonna be able to go through women almost as fast as me. You start to miss one, you find another. That makes it a lot easier, I’ll tell ya that.”

“Some of us don’t consider women replaceable,” she replied pointedly, trying to hold back the smile pulling at her lips.

He held his hands up defensively. “Never said that. Anyway, gimme the rundown. What all’s in that book?”

“Hell,” she deadpanned.

“That bad?”

“Nah, not really. Anyway, it definitely does sound like this thing is what Dad’s facing right now. Tulpas are… okay, so remember that theory how God left because he wasn’t being worshipped enough?”

“Yeah, that was that, uh, that priest, back in Omaha,” Dean agreed. “That guy was  _ not _ taking his meds right.”

“Well, if God was a Tulpa, he’d be right.”

“If…  _ God… _ was a Tulpa,” he repeated, looking at her skeptically.

“Yea. They’re creatures that rely entirely on public belief. They’re popular with Tibetan monks, actually. The meditation and all. There’s even a theory that the universe was created through Tulpa meditation.”

“God’s not the Tulpa,  _ we _ are?”

“Pretty much. The big thing with Tulpas, though, is that while they  _ can _ be anything, they continue to be shaped by public opinion. So if we’re going with the God metaphor, God exists if enough people believe in him, but if everyone who believes in God fully believes that God is actually, like…”

“A duck,” Dean supplied.

“Sure,” she agreed, rolling her eyes. “If everyone suddenly fully believed that God was a duck, he would turn into a duck. Tulpas fit whatever form they’re believed to fit.”

“Like that imaginary friend you had,” he added, jabbing her in the side. “What did you name her? Sully or something, right? Like in that movie?”

She crossed her arms and huffed. “I was six and lonely, jerk.”

“Whatever you need to tell yourself, bitch.”

“Anyway, back to the  _ case- _ ”

“Right, yeah. The case. How do you kill one of these things anyway?”

“Well, you weren’t actually entirely off with the imaginary friend comparison,” she admitted reluctantly, ignoring his grin. “Imaginary friends aren’t actually just a weird phenomenon for kids, they’re usually creatures called Zanna, though Zanna are Romanian. They appear to children in need, and stay until they don’t need one anymore.”

“You’re saying every kid’s imaginary friend isn’t imaginary?” he checked. “That makes no sense, I mean how many of these things are there?”

“Not all of them,” she corrected. “It, uh, it does take a lot of focus to literally have a creature spring into existence, so they really only appear to the, uh… powerful children?” she finished with a wince. “We already know I have my  _ unique _ mental capabilities. But my point was that they pretty much function the same. I mean, I got rid of mine by just telling it I knew it wasn’t real and I didn’t need it.”

“It relied on you believing in it.”

She nodded. “Like a small scale- nice- Tulpa. So the best way to defeat a Tulpa is to kill the idea of it. So just like if God left because people weren’t worshiping him, a Tulpa would die if people no longer believed in it. Or if they believed it was dead.”

“Wait, so the people who think God is dead, or gone, are the reason he’s gone? That’s a bad cycle though- people stop believing, he leaves, people realize he’s gone, he’s  _ really _ gone?”

She blinked. “God’s not actually a Tulpa,” she reminded him, smiling at the pink rising on his cheeks. “But yes, if God’s real and that’s how he operates, then you’d be right. Anyway, so this one in Denver is currently a bigfoot.”

He choked, barely clamping a hand over his mouth in time to stop himself from spitting coffee all over the windshield. “A little warning next time, huh, Sammy?”

“Sorry, sorry. So lots of people believe in Bigfoot, right? Even if they don’t admit it. Y’know, the idea that there’s something in the woods isn’t that hard to believe, and it’s not really worth arguing with. However it worked out, enough people focused on this idea that now there’s essentially a legitimate bigfoot in the area, and it’s racking up a body count- the other kind of body count, dumbass. Six people have died.”

“Oh.”

“That sums it up.”

“So now we just gotta kill Bigfoot.” He shook his head. “Add that to the list of sentences I never thought I’d have to say.”

“You can say that again. So anyway, that brings me to the other way to kill a Tulpa. If you can make everyone, and I mean everyone, believe the Tulpa can die in a certain way, then that method will work.”

“So either everyone has to stop believing in Bigfoot, or we just have to… alter the narrative a bit. That can’t be that hard, right?”

“It shouldn’t be,” she agreed. “But if not enough people believe it, you may as well be trying to, I dunno, cut down a tree with a fish. They’re unreliable, that’s why hunters hate them so much.”

“Hunter’s are usually right,” Dean grumbled, giving her back her coffee and turning up the music. 

Hunters were definitely right.

“Two weeks, he says,” Sam was saying, ignoring Dean’s glare and resting her feet up on the dashboard. “Good old piece of cake. Two weeks, and then we’d leave this fuckin’ town.”

“Language, Sammy.”

She rolled her eyes, turning to look out the window so he wouldn’t see. “It’s been a month, De, and he’s been here for a week past that. We’ve made literally no progress, and I don’t see that changing.”

He whipped around to face her, flipping off the music with a silence louder than his voice, and it was a testament to his driving abilities that he didn’t swerve and hit anyone. “You know what else isn’t making any progress, Sammy?”

She took a slow breath. “Can’t say I do,” she claimed.

“You haven’t  _ spoken _ to Dad- hell, you’ve barely looked at him. It’s been a month, Sammy, you know that. When are you gonna let this up?”

She didn’t know what to say to something like that, just let her hand fly up to check her cheekbone, to feel the bone that was still working on mending itself, and waited, her eyes locked on the window, until Dean had sighed and turned back to the road. 

“Remember like… damn, what would that be- five-ish years ago,” she asked finally, tracing the stitches on the patches of her jeans, “when Dad dropped us with that pastor guy down in that hick town in Mississippi?”

“It was Alabama,” Dean corrected automatically. 

“That one, yeah. Pastor Richard.”

“Pastor Dick,” he muttered, shooting her a smirk, and she couldn’t help but laugh at the old nickname they’d had for the man.

“Yeah. And we called him that ‘cause he wouldn’t let me train or anything, remember? He’d take you deer hunting and let you handle any weapon you wanted, but he wouldn’t even let me go running. He just sent me into the kitchen with Ms. Beth and said I should learn all the womanly skills or whatever.”

“You did learn to make a  _ mean _ peach pie.” She stared at him. “Though, obviously, that doesn’t mean I approve of you being sent to the kitchen,” he rushed to add. “Never kitchen your women. Especially the ones who like knives too much.”

“Right. Anyway, she told me more than how to make a pie,” she told him, jabbing an elbow into his side. “She told me this thing, said her mama told her when she was young. Told me that the first time a girl bleeds isn’t from tripping and falling, or getting in a fight, or even, you know, girl stuff.” She shrugged. “Y’know, she hugged me, and she gave me a knife, and she told me the first time a girl bleeds is from biting her tongue.”

“And?”

“And I dunno, Dean, she had me promise her that I wouldn’t do that, not ever. Not like she did, and not get tied down to some man who’s gonna rely on the fact that you’re not gonna speak up. She said if you always bite your tongue, it’s your fault when someone figures you don’t need it and cuts it right out.”

“And you keep this promise by gettin’ your ass beat?” he asked gruffly, shaking his head. “Sammy, there’s a difference between biting your tongue and not being a dumbass.”

“You don’t have to tell me to pick my battles, okay? I knew what I was doing. This was one of the battles I picked.”

“Why? Why this one, why now?”

She let out a short huff of a laugh. “I took my SAT’s,” she admitted evenly, enjoying the blank-faced stare he gave her. “I didn’t have any exams on Wednesday. That was testing day. I’ll be able to get my scores next time we’re in one place for a while.” She shrugged. “And I really did want to finish the year. I don’t know if our next school would have let me move up to tenth grade next year without exam scores.  _ And... _ I wanted you to get your degree. You deserve it, you deserve to have your options open.”

“Sam-”

“Don’t you start about how your education doesn’t matter and your future doesn’t matter, and how you should uproot your life at the drop of a goddamn hat and maybe lose any chance at getting out, Dean Winchester, and don’t you say I shouldn’t have risked something for you, and don’t you blame yourself for Dad being mad, and don’t you dare accuse me of pinning this on you, I swear on the goddamn Lord,” she told him fiercely, ignoring the heat rushing to her cheeks.

His voice was stilted. “...I was just gonna say thank you,” he said, finally meeting her eyes. He chewed on his lip for a moment before continuing. “I mean it. I would have just left, never gotten the degree. Thank you, Sammy.”

“Of course. Jerk,” she added, grabbing a fry from the box on his leg.

“Hey, I payed for those, bitch” he protested. “ _ Hey _ , no puppy dog eyes over my fries. Just ‘cause you already ate yours-” She pouted, and he sighed. “Fine, whatever,” he cut himself off, shaking his head and reaching over to mess up her hair. “Just my luck I end up with a baby sister I can’t say no to.”

“You love me and you know it.”

“And it’s gonna be the death of me,” he agreed.

She watched the lights flicker off in the bar windows as they slipped down main street. It was barely past midnight, but the little hick town they’d stopped in didn’t seem to have too much of a nightlife, especially on a Wednesday. 

“I’m glad it’s you, though,” she told him, keeping her gaze on the men stumbling down the street. 

“Huh?”

“That you’re my brother. I know I… I mean, I fight with Dad a lot, and I say a lot of stuff I maybe shouldn’t say, even if I mean it, y’know?”

He glanced at her, a bit unsure. “You can say that again.”

“Nah, lemme finish,” she interrupted, tapping her fingers on the outside of the car where her arm was hanging out the window. “I just mean I’m not gonna pretend I don’t mean a lot of what I tell him, even the bad stuff, but I don’t want you thinking I’m not grateful every day that I got here, but I mean here with  _ you,  _ not here with him.” She looked over at him

He just stared at her. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” he barked. 

“I- I don’t know,” she replied, blinking rapidly. “I just thought you should know, I-”

“I mean, God, Sam, if you hate it all as much as you say, that includes me, there’s no getting out of that. I’m just as much a hunter as Dad, and I’m not leaving the life, Sam. This is it for me. You hate the motels, I’m paying for them. You hate the food, I’m cooking it. I’m not the special fuckin’ exception here, okay? If I’m your brother, he’s your father.”

“My father is  _ dead _ ,” she spat without thinking, and he flinched like it was his cheek that had cracked.

“Tell me what you really think, huh, Sammy?” he said quietly.

“De, I don’t- you know I don’t-” He held up a hand, and she let herself trail off, pressing her lips together tight to hold in any further protests and digging her nails into her palms where her fists had clenched of their own accord. 

Sam’s lack of blood relation wasn’t really something they talked about, mostly because they never had any reason to. Dean would tease her about it every once in a while, sure, and whenever Dad was really drunk, or injured, or delirious for some other damn reason, he’d go on about it, grabbing her by the shoulders and slurring on and on about how “Family don’t end in blood, Sammy, it don’t end in blood”, and she believed him, because what else did you call people who took you in when you didn’t have nobody, whose wounds you’d stitched up and whose breakfast you’d cooked. That was family, it just was. But for the first time in as long as she could remember, sitting further from Dean than she ever did in that damn car, with her face still broken up from over a month ago, she couldn’t help but feel the distance, that invisible little barrier they could never get rid of, no matter how much they tried to ignore it.

She was Sam Winchester, but before that she was Harriet Potter, and there was nothing in this world that could change it.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, we start seeing some crossover action

“Dad,” Sam called the next morning, cursing herself for the fear thick in her voice.

Dad must have heard it, because he actually looked up from his guns and came to join her in the kitchen, where she had been researching while Dean cooked her breakfast, not even acknowledging her finally speaking to him like he usually would, though Dean was staring at her like she’d grown another head. “You find something, Sam?” 

“There was mail for us,” she told him. “I picked it up last night when I got back, but I only just went through it now.”

“And?” he asked expectantly.

She held the letter out to him, a thick parchment envelope with a red wax seal and her name in curling script, with no return address or stamp. “This has my name on it. My  _ birth _ name.”

He straightened immediately at her words. “Give that here,” he demanded, grabbing the letter from her hand and flipping on his EMF scanner beside the paper, sighing when nothing happened. He kept testing the letter, but salt, silver, and even holy water didn’t cause any sort of reaction either, though she wasn’t even sure how a letter would be possessed, and as far as he could tell, it was just a letter. 

A letter addressed to a girl no one knew was her, to an address Harriet Potter had no reason to be at, and not only an address but specifically “the right side of the second bed, room 7, Summerwater Inn”. Someone would have to be stalking her, and stalking her for a very long time, to address a letter like that, especially if this was the second time.

“Eugene invited us on a hunt in England to leave this Saturday,” was all Dad said. “I think we should take it, get out of here. Whoever the hell is following you needs to lose your trail.”

“What about the hunt, sir?” 

There was something in his eyes she couldn’t name, almost disappointment, but she couldn’t tell what he’d be disappointed in. “That’s not important. Somebody’s tracking you pretty damn close, so we’re getting out. They shouldn’t be able to find you overseas. Pack your shit; I’m gonna see if Eugene can get here any faster.”

“Yessir,” they agreed.

“And the letter, sir?”

“Burn it,” he ordered. “Don’t listen to what bad people, or monsters, have to say, Sam, you know that. Just like you hang up the phone before people try to make deals or threats or anything like that.”

She nodded, pulling a lighter from her pocket and holding the corner of the letter to the flame, waiting until it caught before throwing it in the sink. Dean shoved a plate at her, stacked high with eggs, sausage, and toast. “Thanks, De.”

Their plane left for England the next evening. 

Dad had found some pair of hunters in the area and they agreed to drop the Impala at Bobby’s, saying he owed them one down the line.

Dean hated flying, always had. They’d only taken planes a time or two, and they didn’t bother Sam at all; if she was being honest, she kinda liked them. She liked being able to look out the window and see the world flying past faster than she could ever imagine otherwise. It made everything seem so small, and they were above it all. Dean didn’t trust the tin can up in the clouds idea, though, something about liking a vehicle that he knew how to control.

She thought he didn’t like it all seeming small. Dean liked to feel like what they were doing was the biggest job in the world, a hero’s job, that the whole world fit in the back of their car. If it was this easy to pass it all by, it wasn’t such a big deal anymore.

And then he’d have to acknowledge that travel by Impala was not in fact the most efficient form of travel, and there was no way in hell he’d ever do that.

Luckily, they both just slept for most of the trip. Denver to London was a good ten hours worth of flying, and it was an overnight at that. Between Dad and Eugene, they didn’t have anything to worry about safety wise, and that wasn’t a feeling they got to experience very often, so Sam just had to pray that the unconscious hours would last them a few days. Eugene had a house a bit outside London, which was going to be much, much nicer than the motels they were used to. He’d actually been pretty damn well off before he got into hunting, something pretty rare for a hunter to be, but Sam wasn’t planning on complaining, not when they got to reap the benefits.

“Have you tried the shower?” Dean asked her, poking a head and an arm out of the bathroom door and accepting the towel she offered him. “The water pressure in here is  _ fabulous _ . I mean, holy shit, makes me want to play house for a bit, y’know?”

“Yeah, yeah, you want to live on the  _ Donna Reed Show _ , I get it.”

He tilted his head. “I think we’d be more  _ I Love Lucy _ , don’t you think?”

“I don’t think I’m a housewife,” she replied drily. 

“You could pull off the hair, though.”

“Jerk.”

“Bitch,” he shot back, and so much steam came out of the bathroom when he opened the door that she could barely see inside. She rolled her eyes but he only glared back. “It’s my God given right to boil myself like a lobster, Sammy,” he reminded her, pulling on a t-shirt so worn that it was more holes than fabric.

“You’re so weird.”

“Says the girl who likes cold showers.”

“I do not,” she argued. “Just after runs, and I stand by that, because you’re insane for taking hot showers after training in the dead of summer.”

“You run every morning, though,” he complained, swinging a punch at her shoulder as he passed her that she blocked easily. “Hey, you’re getting better at that one- you didn’t even have to turn to look, did you? And you’re gonna be right there next to me in the loony bin if you keep running for fun.”

“I’ll be next to you in the loony bin because you’re gonna drive me insane.”

“Rude,” he huffed. “Man, this bed is fuckin’ huge.”

“It’s a king.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” he said sarcastically, throwing himself onto the bed and laughing when he almost bounced right back off. “But it’s a nice one, too, not one of those nasty ones that all three of us have to share when the motel’s low on rooms.  _ Bro _ ,” he added. “Eugene has  _ satin sheets _ .”

Her eyebrows shot up, and she tossed her hairbrush back in her bag. “No shit?” He reached over to toss the covers back on her side, and she was in bed in a matter of seconds, letting out a long sigh as she sunk into the mattress. “I’ve never felt anything so beautiful in my life,” she told him, faking a sniffle.

Eugene had gone to bed hours ago, and Dad had followed a bit after, but something about the jet lag combined with the frankly obscene amount of caffeine they’d each consumed had kept them up ‘til three, so when they’d calmed down, the whole house was resting in blissful silence.

She’d curled up against him so he could still face the door, the way they always did it. It didn’t even matter where they were, he was always facing the entrance and he was always facing her. She teased him for it, but he took the whole ‘keep an eye on your sister’ thing extremely literally. She couldn’t complain about him watching the door, though, not after they’d had a few close encounters with creeps and monsters alike.

“So, you think your secret admirer is gonna find you?” he asked, so quiet she could hear the vibrations in his chest better than his voice as his hand came up to play with her hair.

“Stalker,” she corrected, flicking the side of his ribs. “And I dunno,” she told him honestly. “I sure hope not.”

“I don’t know how anybody would even go about getting such a specific address,” he admitted. “I mean, they could know what room you were in, maybe- well, they probably would, actually, if they’re stalking you- but I keep the windows and door locked and the curtains closed, you know that. I mean, knowing which side of the bed you sleep on? That’s just straight up creepy, man.”

“You’re telling me,” she agreed. “Not to mention that no one would know that I’m, well, me. I mean- you know what I mean.”

“I don’t like it,” he told her, and she could hear the frustration pushing on his brows. “I don’t know what more I need to be doing.”

She turned to look up at him, frowning. “This isn’t your fault. You do get that, right?”

“You’re my responsibility,” he corrected softly. “If you’re in danger, that’s on me. If somebody’s been watching you, that was on me to notice and stop and protect you from it, and there ain’t no gettin’ around that. And I’m… I’m sorry, Sammy.”

“You don’t gotta  _ be _ sorry,” she pressed, sighing when his stoic expression didn’t make any move to drop. “But whatever you’re sorry for, I forgive you, you know that, right, De? I can’t stop you from eating yourself alive with guilt, but I’m never gonna blame you.”

“Thanks, Sammy.”

She nodded, pressing her face deeper into his chest, hoping to block out the light from the hallway that Eugene liked to keep on for some godforsaken reason, keeping her focus on how soft the bed was and how Dean’s shirt still smelled like the bonfire Bobby’d set up with them on their last night in Sioux Falls half a forever ago.

“I just wanna keep you safe,” she heard him mumble a few seconds before he was asleep. “Gotta watch out for you.”

She woke up the next morning gasping in a pool of her own sweat, flipping her knife out on instinct and looking around frantically, trying to find the threat whatever the hell it was. There was something beside her, something moving. She whipped towards it.

“Sammy?” Dean groaned, his voice rough from just waking up. “Sammy, it’s just me, put the knife down.”

“Sorry, sorry,” she told him, her voice still shaky as she slipped the knives back in the holsters on her thighs. 

“Was that a…” He trailed off expectantly, and she nodded. “Damn, I’m sorry, kid. Was this another one of the mad ones?”

“Nah, a happy one,” she corrected. “God, I dunno who that guy was, but he was one poor bastard by the end of it.”

“What are you two on about?” a new voice complained, and they both jolted at the unexpected sound. Dad must have woken up when Dean did, she knew he woke up fast when somebody sounded like they were in pain, but she hadn’t heard him move- though, to be fair, she hadn’t listened for his breathing patterns from the other room either.

“Sammy had a nightmare,” Dean answered for her. “Can we go for a drive, sir?”

“Can you go back to sleep?” he retorted.

“It’s already four-thirty, sir,” Sam defended them. “It’s not really worth tryin’ at this point, not if we’ll be training in two hours. We can pick up coffee if you want? Or breakfast?”

He grumbled, pulling a few bills from his pocket and tossing a couple pounds at Dean along with the keys to Eugene’s second car. Honestly, she’d never stop being jealous of the guy’s lifestyle. “Get me a coffee. Use your own money if you want breakfast.”

“Yessir,” they chimed, waiting until he was back in his room with the door shut to move. 

“We passed a coffee shop a few miles down the road,” Dean told her. “Get some pants, I’ll get the car started.”

“You good to drive on the wrong side of the road?” she checked.

He shoved her shoulder so she’d fall back onto her pillow with a thump. “Are you questioning me?” he challenged, slipping into his impression of Dad that he only did when they were sure the man wouldn’t hear. He held the glare for a moment before he broke it and laughed. “We’ll be fine, it’s not like there’s anyone else on the road at this hour as it is. Meet me downstairs in five or it’s your money buying us breakfast.”

She groaned, pushing the covers off and stretching while Dean slipped out of the room, shutting the door behind him. He got cold easy, hence him wearing sweatpants to bed in the summer, but the same couldn’t be said about her. Though, in hindsight, it may have just been drilled into him to be dressed and ready to go at all times.

Honestly, if she found anything about him that he just did for himself, she’d be shocked.

She grabbed a pair of jeans, Dean’s old ones that were way too big in the waist, since they were the only ones that fit over the rest of her body, and cinched the waist with an old braided belt. She was lucky that was a look that was coming back into style, because it was much nicer to be called fashionable than asked if she had a place to sleep at night. Not that the question was unwarranted, of course, seeing as they alternated between motels and the car, but that didn’t mean she liked it. She grabbed a hair tie out of the pocket of her bag and the wallet she’d stolen from a mall in Seattle, and pulled on her boots as she hopped out of the room, dashing down the stairs fast enough that a less coordinated person would have fallen.

“Damn,” Dean announced grudgingly when she swung into the passenger’s seat. “Four minutes and fifty-two seconds.”

“You were timing me?” she asked incredulously.

“Of course I was timing you,” he scoffed, turning on the radio and almost instinctively landing on a classic rock station. “That’s my breakfast money on the line, bitch.”

“Jerk.”

“Tell me about the vision,” he ordered, and she straightened instinctively at his tone. She didn’t know how to explain it- she  _ hated _ when Dad gave them orders, when he couldn’t bring himself to just ask something as a goddamn question, and she doubted he’d ever said the word ‘please’ in his life. When he put on the drill sergeant voice, it activated her fight or flight, but without the flight option turned on; it just made her angry and bitter and ready to argue. But when Dean did it, at least when he wasn’t just parroting Dad’s orders, it was almost calming, that familiarity of natural authority, since he never forced it. 

“I don’t- it wasn’t as clear this time,” she explained. “I think he was… celebrating.”

“You said he was angry last time because he couldn’t get the special rock or whatever,” he prompted her. 

“He got it,” she told him, and she was certain this time. “He got it, and he’s killing… I’m not sure. One of the people who tried to keep him from getting it. More than one, I think, but he didn’t kill them himself. There were others there with him, and each of them killed one.”

“Friends? Groupies?”

“Both?” she guessed. She hesitated. “Family.”

He shot her a look. “Sam…”

“We do kill people together, De,” she had to say. “I mean, that is a thing that we do.”

“Yeah, but we’re not murderous psychopaths. We kill monsters, Sam.  _ Monsters _ . We save lives. We’re  _ heroes _ , Sammy, you gotta get that.” He huffed a laugh. “Monsters hurt people. They’re not natural, they’re not human. We keep the world safe. There’s a difference.”

“They deserve it?” She waited for him to nod. “He thinks they deserve it, too,” she mumbled, drumming her fingers on the car door. She missed the Impala, and sitting on Dean’s left was a weirder feeling than she wanted to admit. 

He frowned, pursing his lips but letting the thought trail off. 

“Dean, you’re about to miss your turn,” she told him, grabbing the wheel and pulling them into a small dirt lot.

“What? Sam, why are we stopping in an empty lot?”

She frowned. “There’s a coffee shop,” she said slowly, like she was explaining something to a small child. “With a big sign out front that says ‘coffee’. I don’t see anything else on this road.”

He stared at her weirdly. “I don’t see  _ anything _ on this road, just some half rotted shack.”

She rolled her eyes. Just ‘cause it was small and a bit run down didn’t mean it was a  _ shack _ . Especially when it was probably the only option open before five a.m. Honestly, he got so touchy about his coffee. “At least they have caffeine.” She slipped out of the car before he could argue and walked right up to the shop, ignoring Dean’s bewildered groans behind her.

It wasn’t until they got a few feet from the door that Dean suddenly startled, tripping back over the steps and almost bringing her down with him if she hadn’t spun out of the arm around her shoulders and grabbed his hand instead to steady the fall. “Dean, what the hell?”

“The lights,” he stammered out, pointing at the window with the glowing ‘open’ sign and the warm lighting behind it.

“‘Kay…” She shook her head, pulling the door open and nodding to the man behind the counter. He was probably around Dad’s age, quite fat, and seemed to be in a downright awful mood that he was working pretty damn hard to combat, which she guessed was pretty much on par for the rest of the world that early.

“How are you two doing this morning?” he asked, overly cheery through his glare in a way she half appreciated, and she could see Dean trying and failing to hold in his laughter as he walked around the shop, touching the knick-knacks on the shelves and dropping his jacket on a chair.

“We’re doin’ alright, thank you, sir,” she answered for them, plastering a pleasant expression on her face.

His brows shot up. “Americans? What brings you out here?” 

“Visiting some old family friends,” she filled in easily. “Jet lag, though, you know how it is. Couldn’t sleep, so here we are.”

“Fair enough. What can I get you?”

“Two black coffees, one with a double shot and some sugar, and a mocha latte with almond milk and a shot of espresso, thank you. Oh, and whipped cream on the latte if you have it. Please.”

“Can do.”

Dean had come back to the counter in time to hear him read the order back and give her change for her ten pound note, and he seemed surprised to see the money. Maybe he’d expected them to only have American dollars? “What’s with the fancy drink? And I thought I was covering.”

“You’re buying breakfast; I can buy coffee,” she defended. “Besides, I know that’s your favorite drink, and you barely ever get them.”

“Yeah, ‘cause they’re overpriced as shit,” he reminded her, rolling his eyes. “Thanks though, Sammy,” he added at her puppy dog eyes, wrapping an arm around her from behind to trap her while tousled her hair.

She wrapped a leg behind his, pressing her foot into the back of his knee not quite hard enough to make them buckle, but hard enough to be a pretty good warning. He let go, albeit reluctantly, though she figured it was more because the wrestling had gotten the man’s attention and Dean wasn’t about to fight back in front of another person. She pulled the hair band in her pocket onto her wrist, pushing her hair back to wrestle it into a ponytail, and the barista gasped loudly, his jaw dropping open wide enough to be concerning, dropping a cup of coffee right on the floor.

“By Merlin,” he exclaimed. “Could it be…”

“Are you alright?” she had to ask. Hot coffee  _ hurt _ when it spilled down your shirt, and the man hadn’t even flinched.

“Great Godric, it  _ is _ ,” he continued, his wide eyes watching her unblinkingly.

“You wanna tell us what the hell’s going on, buddy?” Dean cut in, resting an arm protectively around her shoulders.

“Harriet Potter?” he breathed, and Sam could feel Dean’s whole body tense behind her, and she had to grab his wrist so his hand didn’t go to his gun.

“I think you must have me confused for someone else,” she replied firmly, trying to keep her voice as even as possible. “My name is Sam. This is my brother, Dean. We’re just here for coffee.” She looked over to see Dean eyeing the pastry display and bit at a smile. “And a cinnamon roll and a cherry tart.” 

“Right, right, of course,” he agreed, nodding frantically, muttering something to himself under his breath and busying himself at the coffee machine.

“Do you think we should start cursing to Merlin?” Sam whispered, looking up at Dean and not even trying to bite back the accompanying snicker.

“If you start cursing to Merlin, I’m disowning you.”

“Fair enough.”

When they got back to Eugene’s, Dean left Dad’s coffee on his bedside table, figuring his alarm was set to go off in a couple minutes anyway, and they sat on the back of the car while they ate their respective breakfasts, Dean practically moaning at the taste of his latte.

“You two need a room?” she teased, rolling her eyes.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he sniffed. “All high and mighty with your black coffee.”

She shrugged. “It tastes better.”

He dropped it at that, not even throwing a ‘bitch’ her way. “He knew who you were,” Dean said after a minute. She wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or just talking to himself.

“Maybe it’s just a shit coincidence. Maybe there’s a girl who looks like me, or he knew my parents or something.” She shook her head. “Let’s just go with the normal answer for once.”

“We’re never going back to that shop.”

“No shit.”


	9. Chapter 9

“John, why the hell does weird follow you around like a hound on a trail?” was the first thing out of Eugene’s mouth when Dad got up.

They’d been in England for a little over two weeks, and they still didn’t even know what the hell they were hunting, and God was Sam tired of researching. Eugene had a great library- hell, he even had books that had nothing to do with monsters, which was  _ amazing _ \- but the novelty only lasted so long before she was so far past done that it wasn’t even funny. She’d gone through every bit of lore and mythology she could think of, and nothing. 

Since they didn’t even know what they were fighting, much less how to fight it, there wasn’t much for her and Dean to do other than research and train. Eugene seemed to think it was dangerous enough that she and Dean shouldn’t go anywhere near it, and Dad didn’t want them going into a fight they hadn’t been training for for months. Vamps, werewolves, ghosts, those were pretty run of the mill. They’d known how to kill them since they were little, been practicing with the right weapons and strategies to fight them for years, so Dad trusted them. But something new? Something four researchers and half of Eugene’s European contacts couldn’t pinpoint? That wasn’t something Dad was gonna let them near either.

They’d settled into something almost domestic, and Sam was openly loving it, where Dean was hiding it, but she knew he was enjoying it just as much as she was if not more. Their only responsibilities were training in the mornings and researching in the afternoons, which left evenings open for Dean to go to town in a normal sized kitchen, and for Sam to keep them supplied with peach pie at all times- she’d gotten bored with peach and tried other flavors, and Dean’s complaining had died down when he tried it- and forcing enough vegetables on her brother to keep him from dying young. They got to do normal things, like watch TV before bed rather than just sneaking in a few minutes before they both crashed, and they played poker, all four of them together sometimes, and they argued over who would do what chores, since Eugene’s house took a lot more upkeep than motel rooms that they could just ignore.

They didn’t go back to the coffee shop, though. They found a different one a few miles in the other direction, some chain place Eugene liked to go to.

“What?” Dad was asking, immediately on the defensive, even with his friend. “We flew across the ocean to deal with  _ your _ weird; that ain’t on us.”

“Owls, John,” he replied tiredly, as if that was a perfectly normal answer, rubbing a hand over his forehead. “Owls.”

Sam sent a look at Dean. Eugene loved to be cryptic, but even this was a stretch for him. “Whaddya mean owls?” she asked through a mouthful of French toast.

“Look out the bloody window.”

She ran over to do just that, Dean following close behind her, and what she found was an owl on every fence post, owls half covering the cars, one sitting right outside the window that flew away when she pulled the curtains open. There were all kinds of owls, too, not that she knew much about types of owls, but they were all different sizes and colors, so she was a bit skeptical at their close proximity.

“What the hell?” Dean asked. 

“Yeah, that’s about where I am with this,” Eugene agreed, dropping into a seat at the bartop beside the one Sam had been in, and she slipped around Dean to serve the man some breakfast. “Thank you, darling. There’s absolutely no reason for me to have a hundred owls outside my house, Winchester, but it hasn’t happened before, and now you show up.”

“Maybe you have a mouse problem,” Dad suggested drily, ignoring Dean and hers indignant exclamations, seeing as they were the ones handling the cleaning.

“I do  _ not, _ ” he replied firmly, pointing his fork at Dad accusingly. “Maybe you’ve been hexed.”

Dad just rolled his eyes. “I would have noticed hex bags, Eugene. Maybe  _ you’ve _ been hexed.”

“Maybe no one’s been hexed, and they’re just weird animals,” Sam cut in with a sigh. “Sometimes weird shit has normal explanations.”

Dean hadn’t even finished his admonishment of ‘language, Sammy’ when she knew she’d jinxed it. A loud rustling noise was coming from the chimney and before she knew what to say about it, a swarm of envelopes, just like the one she’d gotten back in Denver, were streaming out of the fireplace and flying directly into their faces like a flock of angry origami swans.

It took about a minute for them to stop coming, and there must have been a good couple hundred letters covering the floor like snow.

Eugene hadn’t moved, just staring tiredly at his friend. “See what I fuckin’ mean? Weird, John. Weird.”

“Burn them,” was all he said, the order directed at Sam and Dean, before walking right out the door without a glance their way and slamming it behind him, and she could hear the engine revving as he drove away a few moments later.

“Yessir,” Sam mumbled at the door.

“You’ve seen those before?” Eugene asked. 

She nodded and started gathering the letters. “Yeah, we were figuring I had some sort of stalker. They’re all weirdly specific addresses, and they all use my birth name.” She shook her head. “We flew here under fake names. We crossed a goddamn ocean. What kind of stalker can follow that? And all these letters?” she added, handing the pile to Dean to burn. “It’s ridiculous.”

Eugene shrugged. “Not to be redundant, darling, but maybe  _ you’ve _ been hexed.”She laughed, but Dean appeared to be seriously contemplating his words, so she paused.

“That would make a lot more sense, actually,” he admitted. “They could be tracking you with some kind of magic. It would explain the addresses, and if they’re tracking you using your birth name, then they might not have ever known you went by a different one.”

“That’s less disturbing than being physically followed around, if I’m being honest.”

“I can protect you from people, I can’t always protect you from magic,” he told her, and his words sounded strangely final. 

“You’re not the only one looking out for the kid, Dean,” Eugene told him firmly, letting his hand fall on Dean’s shoulder with a frown. “It’s not all on you.”

“She’s my responsibility, always has been.” He shrugged the hand off. “Sir.”

Sam winced. Dad was sir, but Eugene was just Eugene, even Uncle Eugene when she was little and he was around more. Dean only slipped back into his soldier routine with anybody else when he was pissed enough to be stubborn about something, which wasn’t all that often. 

As if to prove his point, he threw the letters in the fireplace and tossed a pack of matches in after it, letting the sudden roar of flames punctuate his words, and her eyes were drawn to the melting red wax on the firewood.

“Have you read them?” Eugene asked instead.

“Dad? Letting us ‘negotiate with terrorists’?” Sam laughed. “I think not.”

“The owls are gone,” Dean announced before Eugene could reply. “Sammy, you need practice, come on.”

“I hate you,” she groaned, but she got up anyway, following him to the door.

“If you keep complaining, you’re not warming up,” he warned.

“Who needs to warm up?” She only gave him a split second to shoot her a confused look before she tackled him to the ground.

“You are fucking  _ on. _ ”

But the owls and the letters kept coming. There weren’t any more that day, but the next day and the next day and the one after that were all filled with letters, coming through open windows and every time they opened the door and flying out of the fireplace at random moments. The cars were covered in owls, the roof was covered in owls, the damn birds landed on them the moment they stepped outside. Dad wasn’t even making them train outside after a week or so, and that really said something about just how seriously he was taking it.

By mid-July, they were getting so tired of staying cooped up that he finally pushed them out of the house with a credit card and told them to drive out into a real city and pick up groceries, enough to last them a few weeks, and something to amuse themselves so they’d stay out of his hair. 

Their first stop, at Sam’s insistence, was a book shop. ‘A New Page’ was painted neatly on the sign hanging above the door, swinging a bit in the breeze that was wafting the smell of old books out into the street.

“This is like cocaine for you, isn’t it?” Dean asked her, sounding legitimately curious as she breathed in deep and smiled. “Some people sniff glue, you sniff…” he gestured vaguely at the bookshop and grimaced, “whatever you call this.”

“High on knowledge, baby,” she agreed, rolling her eyes and pushing past him into the store.

“God, you’re such a fuckin’ nerd.”

She had barely gotten through the first row of mystery novels when voice from right beside her startled her out of her focus.

“Great Merlin!” he was saying, and she almost hit her head on the shelf as she jolted upright. “Oh, it’s so wonderful to meet you, really,” he added, grabbing her hand and shaking it enthusiastically. “Dedalus Diggle, at your service, Miss Potter, really.” He spoke too fast, like all the words had been waiting on the tip of his tongue and he was only now letting them bubble out.

“You must have me confused for someone else,” she told him through her teeth, trying to muffle the biting tone escaping her lips and yanking her hand away from the man. “Look, if you’ll excuse me-”

“Oh, you can’t pull my leg that easy,” the man downright chuckled, almost fondly, and she could feel her stomach turning as her hand crept into her pocked where her knife was tucked. “You look just like your father, you do, but with your mother’s hair. And that must be where he… well. And you’ll be back off to Hogwarts, won’t you?”

“Hogwarts?” she blurted, before she could stop herself.

“Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, of course!” he replied cheerily, almost like he was teasing her for pretending not to know, which only made it weirder since she  _ didn’t _ know, and she didn’t know him either.

“Right, yeah. That,” she agreed with an awkward. “Look, I really gotta move on here.”

“No, no, please, stay for a chat- to say I’ve spoken with  _ the _ Harriet Potter-”

She could feel Dean behind her before he even spoke. “Sammy, we should get going. Is this chucklehead bothering you?”

“Not at all,” she denied, letting sarcasm just barely tinge her voice, just enough for Dean to notice it, but not the strange man. She considered saying some sort of goodbye to the man, but before she could make up her mind, Dean had pulled her halfway across the store, his arm deceptively tight around her shoulders. “Hey, hey,” she cut in before he dragged her right out the door. “I have shit to buy.”

He just frowned, but let her go up to the register and count out her pocket change so she could get the small library worth of books in her arms. “What did he want?” he asked, as soon as she was back. “He called you- you know.”

“He was acting like I was famous,” she told him, dropping her bag in the backseat of the car so she wouldn’t have to carry them to the grocery store. “Came up and started shaking my hand all starry-eyed like. Said I look like my, uh, dad, but with my mom’s hair. And said “that’s where he…”, and he trailed off, so I dunno what it meant. And that I’ll be “back off to Hogwarts”, whatever the hell that means. That was it.”

She wasn’t sure why she didn’t tell him the rest. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was the name he’d said, but something about it, some little tingling intuition in the back of her mind, was telling her to hold onto those words, just for a little while. Hold them tight and not tell anybody. Even Dean.

It took three more days for her to finally do it. She slipped outside in the early morning, late enough that nobody would care that she was up but early enough that nobody else was up with her, and she went right up to one of the owls with a letter in its beak, and she took the letter, hiding it in her shirt until she could put it in her duffle bag. 

She would read it. She would find out what the hell it all meant.

But if she didn’t do it right away, it wasn’t too big of a deal, right?


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magic: cool powers to control or evil homewrecking vice? It's still up for debate.

_ Dear Miss Potter, _

_ We are pleased to welcome you back to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for your second year. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment. _

And that was all it said, which was quite possibly the least helpful thing she could imagine, though she frowned when she remembered that Hogwarts was the same place that man in the bookshop had been talking about. She flipped to the second page of the letter, the thick parchment still feeling a bit foreign in her hands, and read through the equally confusing list of supplies.

The book list covered topics like potions and magical plants and charms, and the equipment meant pointed witches’ hats and pewter cauldrons, and she’d gone to schools that required weird supplies, but this one really took the cake. She’d gone to a school for a bit that required you to bring a bible to read for an hour and twenty-two minutes every day, and she’d been to a school that required everyone to bring a baseball to toss around in the middle of class, but she’d never been to a school that told her she could bring a cat, an owl,  _ or _ \- and it appeared to be a very pointed or- a toad. Why the hell would she need a toad at a school?

She wasn’t sure what a letter like that meant for her, though. Clearly it was a school for magic, but why her? Why would she specifically be going to learn magic? Even the man at the bookshop had assumed she was already attending, so she had to assume that it wasn’t common to receive a letter, or else it wasn’t common to reject it. But magic? Really?

But a thought poked at the back of her mind.

It was only eleven or so, so Dean was still downstairs with Eugene having a beer, but she’d faked a yawn and come up to their room to read the letter, the one time of day she could ensure she’d have time alone. She threw back the covers and swung herself out of the bed towards her duffel bag, groaning at the loss of comfort, and rooted through it for a moment before she found what she was looking for: Eugene’s old file on her birth parents.

_ Lily and James Potter- deceased. _

She’d looked at those words enough times it didn’t affect her anymore, but it still took a few seconds to rip her eyes away from the line. Seeing it all laid out so simple was such a weirdly foreign feeling, the entirety of their lives in one word.

Under their names was hers- her birth name- with one word beside it as well.  _ Survivor. _ She knew that much without even looking.

Under her name was a section that had been crossed out and rewritten and circled a few too many times during the weeks Eugene hadn’t known what was going to happen to her, but right below it was one more line, printed neatly.  _ Sam Winchester- hunter in training. _

She flipped through the pages, newspaper cut-outs and a picture of her half burned down childhood home, before she found the page she was looking for.  _ Witches _ , it said, in Eugene’s stupidly precise handwriting.

She hadn’t read the page on witches since she was little. She knew what witches were, she knew how to kill them and how they used their hex bags and rituals and everything else. Besides, she didn’t really want to be caught reminiscing over witches. That would be a surefire way to double her training regimen.

The page detailed something she wished she hadn’t forgotten, because  _ shit, _ it all would have made more sense faster.  _ British magical communities _ , the page read. And communities meant schools.

She was so screwed.

The thing was, though, nothing about being a witch’s kid meant you had to do witchcraft. Sure, it was common for a witch to raise their kids with slightly more spiritual beliefs, but that usually just made the kid a hippie, not another witch. One witch they’d met had actually told them it was a bit of a taboo to do more than just inform a kid about witchcraft. Raising people in it didn’t give them the same opportunity for self-discovery or something like that. It was entirely possible that was bullshit, but she didn’t see what the point would be in telling them that.

So she didn’t get why her parents being witches meant she would go to witch school. It wasn’t genetic or something. Though… shit. The visions. She and Dean had assumed she was some sort of psychic, but could it be some sort of inherited witchcraft? Maybe witchcraft was like drinking, and if you did it while you were pregnant, you could end up with a fucked up baby. That didn’t even make  _ sense _ , but hell, as a hunter, she wasn’t exactly raised to write things off as too weird. They active sought out “too weird”. She looked back at the letter. 

_ All items can be purchased in Diagon Alley, accessed from the Muggle world through the Leaky Cauldron.  _

Well, at least she knew where she had to go, assuming she could find a map of London and then leave for an extended period of time without any of the trained hunters she was living with noticing her absence.

Right. That was realistic.

But luck appeared to be on her side, just a bit. Dad took Dean with him to hunt a ghost somewhere in Ireland, and Eugene was much less strict on her than Dad was, so he agreed to let her take a bus to London to find books on local lore so they could see if any of it was worth checking out. She told him she’d stop for groceries, too, so when she hopped on the bus at eight in the morning, she was fully prepared with more money than she figured she’d need, her list of supplies and a map of London, and her heart stuck halfway in her throat.

Pubs weren’t something she was a stranger to in any capacity, but even she had never been to one at nine in the morning on a Tuesday- Dad had  _ some _ standards at least- and she was more grateful for that by the second. The only people in the bar were almost comically disgruntled, clothes that had fallen apart probably twenty years ago, leering faces creased with hard times and hands shaking around dirty glasses. She pressed her lips together and adjusted her jacket, a beat up leather thing Dean had worn until he outgrew it and gave it to her. 

She decided to approach the side of the bar that was empty, knowing Dean would kill her if she went near anyone in a bar before breakfast was over- not that he wouldn’t have killed her for sneaking into a magical bar at all.

“Sir?” she tried, trying to keep her voice down, but in the relative silence of the establishment it carried unnaturally, a sharp sound that drew all eyes to her. “Sir, I-”

The man behind the bar swung around to look at her, and she was somewhat surprised at his appearance; he was a bit old, sure, but perfectly put together, which had him sticking out like a sore thumb among his customers. “Yeah?” he barked.

“I’m looking for-” she checked the map where she had jotted down the information she needed- “Diagon Alley?” She cleared her throat awkwardly. “I was told I could get there through here?”

He watched her for a long moment before nodding with a grin that was more unnerving than reassuring. “That you can, Miss. Right through here.”

He led her into the back room, which had her hand wrapped around her knife before she noticed she’d moved, but his eyes stayed on the back wall, where he tapped a long stick against a few of the bricks in an order she catalogued carefully, and the wall just sort of shimmered for a moment before it seemed to almost unravel before her eyes, slipping into another dimension until all she saw was a hole that led onto a cobblestone street.

“First year for Hogwarts, I assume?” he asked conversationally as the opening widened into what would hopefully be a functional doorway. 

“Second,” she replied on instinct, wincing slightly at how easily the correction had come. She wasn’t going, she reminded herself. She was just looking into it. Innocent curiosity, nothing more. It sounded like a lie even to herself.

He nodded, stepping to the side to let her pass, and she shot him a somewhat forced smile from over her shoulder as the wall closed up behind her. It was a door from her side now, which was a smart system, if she was being honest. She pressed her back to the wall behind her so she could get a good look at her surroundings, and she could feel herself trying to retreat into her oversized jacket the more she took in.

Her first impression was that she stuck out like a saint in Las Vegas, as Dean would probably tell her if he’d been there. She suddenly felt that all too frequent pang of loneliness as she tended to when he was away. Being attached to someone practically at the hip at all times for as long as you could remember made it pretty damn uncomfortable to be separated. She wouldn’t’ve been able to write off dressing nice, not that she owned anything all that nice that she actually liked, but she was starting to wonder if it would have been worth it just so that she wouldn’t have to deal with the people staring at her ripped up jeans and Zeppelin t-shirt like they’d never seen anything like it in their lives.

In their defense, she figured, they might not have. She doubted Led Zeppelin had reached isolated magical communities. They all wore long robes, like wizards out of a cheesy movie that they would only watch if it was the only thing on TV in that week’s motel, and a few of them even wore pointy witches’ hats, though they were much fancier than the wrinkled black things sold in costume shops. As far as she could tell, Diagon Alley was one long road, with only a couple short side streets, and the door behind her back was the only exit.

That wasn’t ideal, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.

She pulled the list she’d gotten out of her pocket and scanned it for the thousandth time. An assload of books, a cauldron, a wand, and an owl, cat, or toad. Familiars, it appeared, were purchased rather than found in Britain. She wondered what Dad would think of that, before she caught herself. He wouldn’t think about it at all, he wouldn’t even know. He couldn’t.

Books, at least were easy. Dean was right that it was like a drug for her, and like any self-respecting addict, she could sense a good spot from a mile away. 

Flourish and Blott’s, the curling blue script above the door proclaimed. It was as perfect looking on the inside as it was on the outside, a handful of employees strutting around in matching blue robes, every book a brand new leatherbound work of art like she’d never seen before. Bookstores were supposed to be floor to ceiling shelves crammed with yellowing paperbacks and too much dust and barely any organization, not whatever that was. 

She had barely gotten her bearings of the shop when she was face to face with a young man with a nametag that read Sean. “Welcome to Flourish and Blotts, how can I help you today?” he recited in a chipper sort of way that had her trying to hide an uncomfortable frown. 

“Just browsing,” she forced out with a smile. 

“Alrighty! Let me know if that changes, my name’s Sean, and I’m-”

She missed the last part of his sentence, having already slipped away and down one of the perfectly organized aisles. If she hadn’t grown up on  _ Seven Uses for Silver Bullets: The Unpublished Journals of Werewolf Hunters in the West _ and  _ The Complete History of Demonic Possession _ , she probably would have been entered into a psych ward immediately upon reading the titles of the books.  _ A History of Magic, Volume II _ was on her list of textbooks, so she pulled it off the shelf to flip through. Chapters on the Goblin Wars, the invention of household spells, and other shit that sounded so damn casual, as if those were normal topics to read about, were filed in her mind under magical things she was probably supposed to know, and she slipped a copy of the book into her coat, glancing around to make sure no one noticed.

There was a book on lycanthropy she picked up, and she found one on the dying race of the Fae that made her wonder if there was more to the myths than hunters realized. There was really only so many books she could stash on her person without anyone noticing, and she purchased a journal at the counter that she was definitely overcharged for so that she wouldn’t warrant any suspicion of theft. The books were stuffed in her bag as soon as she got out of the store, and she checked her list to move down the line. She had no idea what anyone did with a cauldron, and she didn’t particularly care, but a wand sounded important. 

The wand shop was somewhere she was far more at home, a rickety shop that was definitely getting on in years, stacks of slim boxes on every surface up to the ceiling, a desk that was practically split down the middle, and the only other person was an old man so engrossed in his work that he hadn’t noticed her go in, though to be fair, she was much quieter than most.

“Sir?” she asked, tapping the desk lightly with her finger. He jolted up, and she had to laugh at his deer in the headlights expression. “I was pointed here for a magic wand.” That wasn’t a sentence she’d expected to need.

“Ah yes,” he mused, looking at her carefully from over his glasses. “Young Miss Harriet Potter.”

Witches really did think was normal to call people by name before they introduced themselves, she thought indignantly, forcing herself not to pout. “And you are?” she asked, hoping to prompt some sort of explanation.

“Why, I’m Ollivander, of course,” he almost scoffed. “This  _ is _ my shop, after all. You though, you I’ve been expecting for years. The little savior. Many thought you’d died, you know, but I never believed it.”

She blinked. “Okay…” What was she supposed to say to that? Thanks for knowing she was alive even though my house burned down and no one found my body because she’d been kidnapped by a professional murderer? Seemed like a conversation killer. “So what do wands do?” she asked instead. Most people liked talking about their jobs if it was a business they owned, and fortunately he wasn’t the exception.

“A wand is everything, child,” he told her earnestly, leaning in as though it was a terrible secret. “The conductor for the magic in your very veins, the carrier of spells, the very closest friend you’ll ever have. And the witch doesn’t choose the wand, Miss Potter. It’s a matter of which one chooses you.” Nope. Not ominous at all.

“How do I know which one chooses me?” she asked, and it was hard to keep her voice from trembling, though she wasn’t sure if she was nervous about the process or the fact that it felt so  _ final _ , like the big commitment that she shouldn’t have felt so ready to accept, not with how she knew Dad felt about witches. Dean, too, though she knew he’d have her back. 

She hoped. 

“You’ll know.”

The wand that chose her, whatever that meant, was blackthorn wood with a phoenix feather. The man almost seemed surprised. She shoved it deep in her bag. She had it, for better or worse and all that, but she didn’t have to look at it. The man at the wand shop let her trade some of her money for witch money, too, sending her in the direction of a clothing shop that made school uniforms or something. She’d gone to exactly two schools with uniforms in her life, and she’d hated them both, and that wasn’t even accounting for Dean’s constant teasing. She didn’t need a uniform yet, but she wanted to at least know what they would look like. 

Madam Malkin’s, the shop was called, and the walls were painted powder blue.

“Are you headed to Hogwarts, too?” she heard immediately from her left, and snapped her head towards the source, a tall blond boy leaning against the wall holding a book in one hand that she wasn’t entirely convinced he was reading.

She hummed something non-committal. “What year are you?” she asked.

“Second, and I’m in Slytherin.” He said it like it was an accomplishment. “Are you American?” He said that like it was the worst insult he could come up with.

“Yeah,” she told him, since there was no way or reason to deny it. “I might be transferring for my second year,” she added. It was the closest thing to the truth she could come up with. “What’s Slytherin? I’d love to hear more about it.” She wished Dean was there to hide a smile behind his hand at her thinly veiled sarcasm.

He went on so long it was concerning, but the gist was that he was rich, Hogwarts divided their students into four groups, the group he was in was entirely comprised of people like him, and he thought people whose parents weren’t also witches didn’t deserve to go to school. At least it answered her questions about magical genetics. The other houses, as he described them, were the losers, the nerds, and the idiots. She wasn’t too worried where she’d go.

“I’m Draco, by the way,” he added at the end of his story, and she was glad she tuned back in just in time. “Draco Malfoy.”

“Sam Winchester,” she replied. 

“Winchester?” She nodded. “I don’t recognize the name, though I suppose you are  _ American _ after all… say, your parents were a witch and wizard, right?” He seemed honestly worried, which she couldn’t help but find a bit hilarious.

“Yea, they were. They, er, they died though, so my adoptive family is-” she cut herself off before she could say normal- “not magical.”

“Living with muggles?” He shuddered. “That sounds miserable. At least you’re here now. Muggles would be better than Dumbledore’s people, I suppose, but still. Oh! You probably don’t even know who that is, do you?”

God, he really was starved for people to talk to- or talk  _ at _ , more like. He seemed to relish in the idea of teaching her all about the facts of the world and how he saw them, and she didn't have it in her to stop him, not when there was a chance, even if it was an offhand one, that she’d need to know all of it.

“And they say he’s raising Harriet Potter in secret,” he was saying, and she looked up sharply. 

“Who’s that?” she asked, hoping she wasn’t too obvious in her cover-up.

“Only the little poster child for their whole side,” he sneered. “Apparently, when the Dark Lord killed the Potters back twelve years ago or so, he tried to kill their baby, but the spell rebounded and killed him instead. And burned their whole bloody house down in the process. They say all the aurors found that wasn’t burnt to ash was the empty cradle, but Dumbledore claims she has a lightning bolt on her forehead.”

Unfortunately, that lined up perfectly with everything she knew about that night, and her hand itched to smooth her bangs over her forehead.

“And after that,” he continued, “she was hailed as this savior, and everyone- and I mean  _ everyone _ \- was throwing parties for the little baby that disappeared and coming up with all these theories as to where she went- there’s a whole book series about her, entirely fake- and it’s not like we know if she did anything or if she’s just a symbol and all, but the war pretty much ended there, and everyone who wasn’t grateful the baby committed murder was locked up.”

“People you knew?” she asked, and her hands flew up in surrender at his glare.

“I didn’t say that.”

Definitely people he knew. Or his family knew, anyway, since he was a baby at the time. Probably a family member or two, if she had to guess. His words seemed almost recited, like he’d heard his parents yell about it enough that it didn’t matter what he’d actually experienced, and his anger seemed a little too superficial to be anything but recycled.

“Sorry.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” he dismissed. “They’re saying she’s coming to school this year, not that she bothered to start on time, but reports keep popping up of people saying they ran into her in bookshops and cafes and the like. We’ll have to see, I suppose.”

“I guess so,” she agreed. “Anyway, look, I’d better be going…”

His nod was almost dismissing, though he caught himself at the last second. “If you come to Hogwarts, do find me. I can offer some assistance to help you…” he trailed off and looked her up and down, “acclimate.”

A bit rude, but still a worthwhile offer. 

She pocketed the extra witch money and wrote the boy’s name down on the corner of her shopping list for later, wondering if she’d ever actually see him again. Witches were weird.

She picked up a few bags of groceries after that and took a flier from a woman standing on the corner screeching about the apocalypse, glancing over what the woman thought a demon was and consequently throwing the flier in the nearest trashcan. The ride back was a quiet one, but in her mind there was nothing but noise, a million thoughts rushing through her head.

She didn’t want to go to magic school exactly, but she couldn’t claim she wasn’t at least a little intrigued. And how much of a choice did she have, really? She was still getting a hundred letters a day, and if people’s reports of seeing her were reaching general public knowledge, it would only be so long before someone tracked her down. She couldn’t knowingly lead a bunch of witches to Eugene or Dad or, God, to Dean. That wouldn’t be fair to them. 

She was famous, apparently, which was even worse than having a stalker, though at least no one appeared to know what she looked like. A whole book series about her? Theories about where she was living and what she was doing? It was a lot to take in, if she was being honest, and she had absolutely no one to talk to about it. She could have accepted being a born witch if she was some normal one who could ignore it and fly under the radar, but would she have magic following her the rest of her life? She had the wand that she was spinning between her fingers as she thought, so supposedly she could do magic if she wanted to, and she felt almost sick at the thought, already imagining Dad and Dean finding out.

The boy, Draco, had said that everyone went to Hogwarts. Everyone. If you had magic, you were there. Would they let their savior drop out before she ever started? Besides, if she had magic, and she did- the visions were enough to make her damn sure of it- it was only natural she would learn how to control it. 

She was hit suddenly with the image of her and Dean hunting, and she had a witch’s hat paired with her flannel and he was holding a gun while she was holding the wand, and it seemed so perfect and so impossible that she could have cried right there on the bus. She didn’t even want to hunt, but something about throwing the whole option right out the window was suddenly very intimidating. It was always that backup option, something she knew she was good at that she could do if it came down to it.

But magic, learning how to control it, maybe even learning how to control the visions, just wasn’t something she was ready to let go of like that. She had her wand, she had the books that she would have to pretend she found in some normal store, she even had a bit of her own magic money. She could handle it all maturely, she prayed, and more realistically she could just put it off. Out of sight, out of mind.

She got home to a hundred new owls with letters on their legs and in their beaks. Out of sight, out of mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey y'all i'm back!! forgot i had this account but here we are so i hope you enjoyed the chapter! i finally wrote an outline for this entire story and i already know how it's gonna end which has never happened but it does mean that i should have more updates coming soon. stay posted babes. as always, i don't edit, so feel free to let me know if anything's entirely nonsensical and feel free to ignore the shit parts because that happens sometimes <3


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